


A Light To You (In Dark Places)

by skitzofreak



Series: little by little, one travels far [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Air to Air Combat, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Found Family, Funeral Traditions, Holiday Traditions, Homesickness, Poor communications, Rated for Warfare, Rated for swearing, Rebelcaptain Secret Santa, Star Wars Holidays, Trench Warfare, alternate universe - everybody lives/nobody dies, for alien languages, hover text, post scarif
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-20 03:01:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 35,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13137714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak
Summary: Cassian scrambled to his feet and shoved between Jyn and the other soldier, squinting out at the nearby light.And straight into the black, empty eyes of a stormtrooper helmet.The singing on both sides died.-Rebelcaptain Secret Santa Gift: In the middle of a terrible war in a galaxy far, far away, a flicker of light in the darkness.





	1. In the Dark Season

**Author's Note:**

  * For [guineapiggie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/guineapiggie/gifts).



> My gift to guineapiggie, aka [ruby-red-inky-blue](http://ruby-red-inky-blue.tumblr.com/) on tumblr.  
>  _Prompt: The World War I[Christmas Truce](http://time.com/3643889/christmas-truce-1914/) (note: in-universe SW version ok)_  
>  _Smut preferences: “I do enjoy a touch of smut, buuut I generally prefer fics that don’t focus on it – nothing above M for me, please”_
> 
> I liked this prompt so much that I got a bit carried away with it, and had to break it down into 3 (long) chapters. I will post them over 3 days, just to keep from fic overloading everyone as we go through the Secret Santa event. There's a lot more angst than I really wanted there to be, but honestly? It's a war prompt, which is both A) right up my alley and B) A Painful Subject Anyway. So I hope I didn't overdo it, I hope you enjoy your gift, guineapiggie, and most of all, I hope you have a great holiday season!

_“Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that came down to us from the darkness of those days, there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death, light that endures.”_

_– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion_

 

 

Something was wrong with Bodhi and Cassian, and Jyn didn’t know what. Bodhi was the most obvious; he wouldn’t quite meet her eyes today. Instead, he sat in the cockpit of the light freighter they’d been given for the mission, singing under his breath in Jedhan and absently kneading at the faint scars on his temples the way he did when his thoughts felt scattered and uncertain. Jyn didn’t understand Jedhan that well, but she could pick out words like “dark” and “lost,” and when he caught her staring at him, he hunched one shoulder and muttered that it was a traditional song. Then he went back to humming, and Jyn touched her crystal and decided not to ask  _traditional for what?_

Cassian was not as scattered as Bodhi; on the contrary, he seemed extraordinarily focused as he bent over his datapad and several sheets of crumpled flimsi in the common area of the freighter. He’d been there for the entire three days of the trip so far, only leaving it for the ‘fresher or to check on something in the cockpit.

Jyn, who had lived through her share of restless nights, had not commented the first night he hadn’t come to bed, choosing instead to pass out for a few hours on the hard benches in the common area. The second night, she’d reminded herself that sharing a narrow bunk with someone else wasn’t really that comfortable anyway, and they had only been together a few months as it was. He didn’t owe her an explanation; she didn’t need him to be there.

The third night, Jyn did something she’d never done in her life, and went to bed with the door to the cabin propped open. It wasn’t that she was worried, or lonely. It was only that she had gotten used to him there, had learned to fall asleep to the steady beat of his heart and the slow cadence of his breath. Chirrut had told her once about a woman in Jedha who raised musk-hounds; when puppies had trouble sleeping, the woman would slip an old chrono under a blanket, to mimic the sounds of their mother’s heartbeat and soothe them to sleep. When Jyn curled around Cassian in bed, she was typically  _not_  thinking of her mother, but she guessed the principle was the same. And once she was used to it, of course, the absence of it was simply…jarring. That was all.

The third morning after she’d tossed and turned in the darkness, ignoring the empty space on the mattress beside her and listening to Bodhi hum his strange, soft song in the nearby cockpit, she went looking for Cassian. He was slumped on the table with his head on his arms, datapad secured but the flimsies all over the table surface. That was…very unlike him, actually, to leave data like that exposed, even in the middle of hyperspace with only the four of them all together.

Jyn stared at his hunched shoulders and listened to his soft breathing for a few long minutes, and then she went to find K2SO.

“You are concerned about something,” Kay announced as soon as she propped herself against the bulkhead by his charging station and folded her arms.

Jyn fixed her attention on the viewport across the cargo bay and nodded.

“My organic emotional analysis subroutines are equal to any snitty protocol droid,” he said with great satisfaction. Jyn raised an eyebrow at him, but Kay simply whirred quietly, clearly not interested in explaining. “If your concern is with regards to the mission on Veladine, then I can give you the odds of our success.”

She shrugged an irritable shoulder. “It’s not a tough op.”

“Reconnaissance operations are rarely as simple as they are initially calculated.” Kay turned his glowing optics to regard her. “Imperial presence on Veladine is relatively small, and local rebel forces have only been actively engaged for four standard months. The likelihood that strategic resources will be entirely - ”

“Not worried about the mission,” Jyn cut him off. “Not worried about anything,” she added after a beat. “Just…wondering.”

Kay made a slightly grating noise that sounded like two gears catching and was his version of an irritated grunt. “What is the focus of your  _wondering?_ ”

“Bodhi,” Jyn muttered, looking stubbornly out of the viewport.

“His decrease in social communication and poor focus in tactical briefings has been noted,” Kay agreed, somewhat to her surprise. “There is an eighty percent chance this dysfunction is due to the galactic standard calendar.”

Jyn stared at the droid. A long silence filled the cargo hold, and then Jyn rolled her eyes and growled, “What  _about_  it?”

Kay turned his glowing optics to her again. “By the galactic standard calendar,” he said as if speaking to an idiot, “tomorrow is  _svelo dize._ In Basic, this translates to - ”

“The Festival of Light,” Jyn murmured.

“Well if you knew, you didn’t need to ask,” Kay’s voicebox seemed perfectly calibrated for tones of annoyance and disapproval, she had long ago noticed. Jyn ignored his buzzing, staring out the viewport at the blue light of hyperspace streaking by as she turned this over in her mind. She didn’t know much about Light Night, not really. It was a holiday that was celebrated by most planets around the galaxy, although they didn’t always sync up properly. There were a lot of lights, obviously, and merchants got rich because people bought all sorts of gifts, and politicians liked to make speeches about peace. It was usually a good time to pull certain cons that depended on guards being short-handed and workers being distracted by the festivities.

She had a feeling Bodhi didn’t think of it in those terms.

She had no idea how Cassian thought of it. If he thought of it.

“When is - ” she started, and then bit her lip, frowning at the viewport. She took a deep breath and asked, “Does Fest celebrate Light Night?”

Beside her, Kay also stared straight ahead as his charger hummed and beeped softly. “I have not downloaded that information,” he said at last. “It seemed inappropriate.”

Jyn jerked her head to stare at him in open astonishment. “Inappropriate,” she repeated incredulously. “ _You_  were worried about being inappropriate?”

Kay somehow contrived to look even more stiff than usual. “Cassian is very concerned with personal boundaries.”

“Not really,” Jyn said absently, trying to remember if she’d ever heard him speak of Fest’s history or holidays. Mooning about the traditions of his lost home explained Bodhi’s oddness, but it just didn’t seem like something Cassian would do. But then…how would she know? When it came right down to it, she hadn’t known him very long at all.

“Well then I suppose you could just ask him,” Kay said peevishly, and his red charging light flashed a little brighter. “I will remain here.”

“Sleep tight,” Jyn muttered, pushing off from the wall and hitting the door switch. The ancient freighter’s cargo door dragged open painfully slow, sticking halfway as the tiny engine inside strained against the bent rails.

“Sleep is an organic need. I siphon ship power while running low-power scenario analysis.”

“Don’t let the circuit-eaters bite,” Jyn called glibly as she impatiently shoved the battered cargo door open the rest of the way and walked towards the common area.

Kay’s voice drifted petulantly up the short, narrow passageway after her as the cargo door slowly ground shut on rusty rails. “Those are not real.”

Cassian was awake when she came back into the common area, standing over the sink and frowning groggily at the cup of slightly burnt caf in his hand. Jyn ignored the smell and stepped closer, ghosting one hand against the back of his shoulder. He glanced back at her, but his face seemed distant and his eyes unfocused.

And he didn’t lean back into her hand. Normally he –

Jyn bit her lip and told herself to stop being stupid. She dropped her hand a little awkwardly, relieved that at least no one was around to see her fumble, and hunted for something neutral to say to cover the moment. “Almost there,” she came up with at last.

Cassian jerked his head in a quick nod, then winced, reaching up to rub at his neck. Which wouldn’t have been sore if he’d slept in the bed. But he didn’t, Jyn reminded herself firmly. And that was fine.

It was fine.

“It will be dark when we land,” Cassian rasped, then took another long drink of his caf and cleared his throat.

Jyn nodded and folded her arms, working hard to look as casual and unaffected as possible. “Yeah?”

“Veladine has only two seasons,” he explained, trudging back to the table and sitting down next to his stacks of flimsi. “It has around-the-clock sunlight for half the year, and total darkness for the other half.” He rolled his shoulders stiffly, then picked up his datapad. “We’re arriving in the middle of the dark season.”

Jyn debated for a moment, and then deliberately sat down next to him at the table, her leg brushing his. She watched carefully from the corner of her eye, but he didn’t even blink. He didn’t look up, either, or give any outward indication that he noticed she was there. Well, he never appeared to react, he just…he never  _appeared_  to react.

But there was something empty in his non-reaction, this time around. Normally, he at least reached out and rested his hand on her knee, sometimes briefly, sometimes leaving it there, sometimes sliding it a little higher than was strictly appropriate if –

Shit, she was obsessing, wasn’t she?

“I op checked the night vision goggles,” she replied. “Two working sets. You and me?”

“Yes, I think so,” he shuffled through his flimsi and answered in a detached voice. “Bodhi can talk with the X Wing squadron that showed up last month. They’ll like talking to him better than us, and they will have plenty of lights in the hangars. Kay and I will find the ground commander. You can talk with the unit commanders and ground soldiers.”

“Captain Tanoor,” she murmured, watching his face. He dipped his chin slightly, more to himself than her. Jyn’s jaw ached, and she forced herself to unclench it. She was being oversensitive. Whatever was going on probably wasn’t about her at all. He didn’t have to share everything in his life with her. It was fine.

More humming from the cockpit drifted back towards them; that same soft song that Jyn didn’t recognize, the one that spoke of darkness and loss. Cassian didn’t seem to notice – in fact, Jyn thought with narrow eyes, he didn’t even glance up absently the way he always did when a new noise filtered into his consciousness. His breath didn’t catch or shift, but there was something uneasy in his body language, similar to the way he held himself when he was injured and trying not to show it.

She should probably leave him alone. Jyn had a wide variety of skills at her disposal, and she was no fool, but whatever was going on, she was probably completely unequipped to deal with it. She should just let it go, get ready to land on a planet currently in the middle of its first major open conflict in hundreds of years. Veladine had been a peaceful mining planet for ages, until at last the ever-more draconian Imperial restrictions had finally choked the miners’ economies so badly that people were rioting in the streets. The nearest rebel base had sent over fighters and commanders to help run the uprising, but no one had heard anything about their progress for months. She would need to be on her game down there, not tangled up around whatever was happening with her teammates’ emotions.

“I think he’s upset about Light Night,” Jyn murmured, and wanted to kick herself.

“Probably,” Cassian replied in a flat tone. His hands, Jyn noted, were suddenly still on the datapad, and his eyes were locked on the screen but unfocused and far away. “They say the first Festival of Lights was on Jedha. The traditions run deep there. Ran deep,” he corrected in a quieter voice.

“So that song he keeps singing,” Jyn tilted her head toward the cockpit, but Cassian still didn’t look up, so he didn’t see. “It’s a Festival song?”

“Probably,” Cassian repeated, then determinedly tapped at his datapad as if he was completely absorbed in its contents, although Jyn could feel the tension in his leg against hers under the table.

Jyn considered him, the edges of her kyber biting into the fingers of one hand as she clutched it. Carefully, feeling her way forward, she asked, “Do you…what should we do?”

Abruptly, he shoved to his feet and stalked back to the sink, dumping out the dregs of his caf and refilling his cup with water. “We don’t need to do anything,” he said firmly. “He’s a professional. He’s fine.”

Jyn’s leg was cold where she had been pressed against him. Slowly, she lowered her hand from her crystal. “’Course,” she said quietly, and she knew, she knew that she should let it go, that he wanted her to let it go, but something stubborn in her tugged her tongue. “But - ” she shifted her weight, tapped one restless fingertip against the table top, then blurted, “It might help.”

“Help what?” Cassian had his back to her, one hand clutching his mug and the other braced against the sink edge. His shoulders looked relaxed, his stance casual, but the flatness of his voice made Jyn’s own muscles tense, her jaw locking again in defensive anger. What was wrong with him? Did he hate the Festival? Was he that worked up about this recon? Or was it something completely different?

…had  _she_ made him angry? Although if that was the case, Jyn thought fiercely, then he could have just said so, not turned his back on her, not walked away, not –

Jyn swallowed, and said very quietly, “Are you going to sleep tonight?”

Now his shoulders did hunch slightly, and he waved the caf mug a little haphazardly. “Depends on what we find down there, no?”

“You need it, though,” Jyn tried to sound as casual as she could, although her voice felt small and a restless sort of energy was buzzing under her skin. She wanted to get up and stomp over to him, maybe grab the caf mug from his hand and force him to look at her. She wanted to just ask him what was going on. But the soft, safe thing between them was so new, so fragile, and a part of her wanted desperately to keep it alive, so she stayed in her seat and ran her palm slowly down the fading warmth on her thigh, and waited.

 “I’ve been sleeping,” he replied indifferently, but there was a warning in the words, the rattle of the sheecas-snake, the growl of the cornered wolf.

“Yeah,” Jyn set her hands flat against the tabletop and took a deep breath, trying for a light tone. “Bed’s been a bit cold without you, though.”

 It was the wrong thing to say, she knew it before she’d finished speaking, because Cassian thumped the caf mug back into the sink and said in a brittle voice, “I’d like us to be focused on the mission, Jyn.” He braced both hands on the edge of the sink and then added in an entirely too reasonable, judiciously patient voice that she only ever heard him use on particularly annoying contacts, “Veladine has bigger problems than our personal comfort. They need professionals.”

The words splintered and dug into her skin like shards of broken glass, exactly as he must have known they would. Jyn slammed away from the table and stalked to her (their) cabin without looking back. She slapped the door switch closed and waited until the protesting motor dragged the door shut, and then she locked it. The only light was the faint strip coming in from under the door, but Jyn didn’t flip on the overhead. She knew where her gear was stashed, where her heavy jacket hung on the wall next to the bed, next to Cassian’s parka, right above their weapons’ locker, where his rifle was nestled down next to her truncheon and -

She thumped back against the door and wrapped her arms tightly around her middle, scowling at the faint light on the floor. It was hardly anything, really, not even a fight. They’d  _had_  a fight before, and she remembered what it felt like. She remembered with great clarity how intent his eyes had been on her, how sharp his voice had cut, how his breath had scraped across her face as he leaned in to call her a coward and she had fought back tooth and claw and neither of them had even remembered the other people in the shuttle.

He certainly hadn’t been standing with his back to her.

So this wasn’t that fight. It wasn’t any fight. It wasn’t anything. It was just – he didn’t have to – it wasn’t that she wasn’t focused on – where did he even get off –  _fuck_.

Fine. She was fine.

Jyn leaned against the locked door in the darkness and made herself breathe.

 

_\--_

 

“Five minutes ‘til drop out,” Bodhi flipped the vaporator into “warm up” mode to prep for entering an atmosphere with enough moisture to replenish their water supply, and readied the grav-drive to switch off as soon as they hit the gravity well of the planet. Veladine had a standard gravity field, so they wouldn’t need the drive once they entered the goo.

In the copilot seat, K2SO was plugged into the console, calculating immediate hyperspace escape routes in the event that they accidentally popped out in the middle of an Imperial trap. It was the sort of thing Cassian insisted on doing, and Bodhi figured it was a paranoid but understandable precaution, all things considered. Behind him, Cassian leaned against the empty passenger seat, his arms folded against his chest and his eyes locked on the viewscreen. When Bodhi glanced back, the captain looked haggard, maybe even more than usual. But it was a nasty planet they were headed for, and a terrible time of the year to go. Was there ever a good time to visit a snow-covered war zone? No, but Bodhi found it particularly bitter that they were headed for a planet currently locked in endless night, when this time last year he would have been home amid a sea of bright lanterns and glowing fires and -

“Two minutes,” Kay said, and the real-space indicator beeped in agreement. Bodhi rested one hand on the throttle and the other on the controls, ready to dodge in case they came out too close to another ship. It happened, sometimes, and while the odds were low that anyone would be flying near a hyperlane drop out point, well, some of Cassian’s paranoia was probably rubbing off on him.

In the other passenger seat, Jyn sat silently with her hands clutching the arm rests, her face as impassive as a statue. Her fingerless gloves were fraying again, Bodhi noticed, worn around the edges and threatening to rip right off her hands. Maybe that should be his Festival gift to her, he thought vaguely, new gloves would be nice, right? Useful? Did she celebrate the Festival? Did she even know what it was? He’d never asked. He’d seen her clutching her kyber crystal, though, her head bent and her eyes shut tight. Did she pray? Maybe he could teach her the Bright Song, so he wouldn’t have to sing it alone…

“One minute until real-space,” Bodhi said, and in the back of his mind, his mother sang softly  _the light, the light, my beloved one, the light in your eyes is never lost in the darkness._

“Dropping…now,” Kay announced, and Bodhi pulled the hyper-throttle back evenly, watching the streaks of light snap back into shimmering dots as-

 _-_ on the right hurtling towards their viewscreen in a streak of black and grey –

 _“Break left!”_ Bodhi shouted to no one, and slammed the shuttle into a ninety-degree turn away from the oncoming mid-air collision, diving the nose into a slant down. The proximity detectors were screaming at him, his whole console lit up like the Great Kyber Temple on Light Night itself, and behind him Cassian shouted something Bodhi didn’t have time to process. Another incoming shape on the left –  _TIE fighter, shit, they were surrounded by TIE fighters!_  – Bodhi threw the wing over right and rolled, still diving. The white curve of Veladine glowed invitingly below them, so Bodhi angled desperately for it, rolling left as another shape screamed past the viewscreen, red lasers firing in eye-searing bursts as the X Wing shot by the freighter.

“Bodhi, get to the ground!” Cassian’s voice was almost in his ear, barely audible over the pounding of Bodhi’s heart. The engine warnings were blaring at him as he pushed the throttle and controls beyond their limitations. The proximity detectors were going mad, but they were never meant to track fighters like TIE or X Wings so they couldn’t get a handle on the projected range or course and were simply screeching about impending collision, turning the cockpit into a cacophony of terrifying noise.

 “Pull up!” Jyn’s voice cut through the noise like a knife, and Bodhi didn’t even look, he yanked the controls almost into his lap, throwing the throttle to full power and just narrowly avoiding crashing into the TIE screaming up towards them. Green lasers streaked past their viewscreen, and yet another alarm flashed frantically on the console.

“Fire in cargo bay alpha,” Kay said with eerie calmness. “Automatic suppression system not responding.”

“This ancient hunk of recycled bantha sh-” Bodhi choked off his curse and slammed the freighter into a tight split S, feeling the old ship shudder around him as he forced it through maneuvers it had never been intended to do in its prime years, let alone now that it was old and worn and taped together by little more than the Rebellion’s desperation.

“I am the logical choice to put out the fire manually,” Kay declared.

“Then go! Go!” Cassian dove forward and took the copilot seat, scrabbling for the safety rigging that Kay had not needed, and the droid clumped away into the rear.

In front of the windscreen, a TIE and an X Wing were headed straight for each other, firing relentlessly, a second or so from impact. Bodhi slammed the freighter right and low, trying to get away from the dogfight, and something clipped their underside, lighting up another two alarms and sending the ship drunkenly reeling through space. Somewhere in the haze of frantic fear and thundering heartbeat, a small corner of Bodhi’s mind slowed and quieted, a soft little space where there was nothing but hard bank left, control wing over, forward throttle and nose up, nose down, and his mother smiling as she sang,  _spiraling lights in the night and oh my beloved boy, my bright boy, bright as the lights of the Festival night!_

 _“Bodhi, land!”_ Cassian bellowed at him, slapping the alarm override switches and killing some of the noise in the cockpit.

_“What do you think I’m trying to -!”_

“The fire in cargo bay alpha is suppressed,” Kay informed them helpfully over the comm.

“There,” Jyn’s arm appeared next to Bodhi’s face, jabbing down through the chaos towards the planet. Bodhi tracked along her finger and saw what she had – a clear path out of the battle and a cloud bank big enough to lose any fighter that might trail them. Bodhi threw the freighter into another roll and plunged through the flashing lights and silent explosions around them, holding his breath as the freighter shuddered and screamed in protest until at last the proximity detectors went silent and a chime from the atmo-bleeder announced that they had entered a breathable atmosphere. The ship shuddered slightly as it switched from cycled air to intake oxygen, then smoothed out again. The viewscreen went white as they dropped into the storm clouds, and Bodhi switched to purely instruments to navigate towards the coordinates where they would land and meet the local resistance.

“No contacts following,” Cassian said in a cool voice so different from two minutes ago that it was jarring. “Looks like we’re in the clear.”

“Praise the Force,” Bodhi muttered. His teammates were silent, and he flinched a little. Were they not believers? Did that mean Jyn wouldn’t like to learn the Bright Song? Well, that would be alright. Someone else on base would probably know it, when they got back. It would be too late to sing it for the Festival, of course, but, well, there was a war on. He could be a bit late.

“We’re here,” he said unnecessarily, as the freighter broke through the bottom of the clouds and into the snowstorm on Veladine’s surface. A spike on the IFF told them that someone had locked onto their craft with a laser weapon, and a moment later the radio crackled with a new voice.

“Unidentified craft, this is Orange Three with the Rebel Alliance Fleet,” the newcomer snapped in a tight, professional tone – a female Human, Bodhi decided, although that wasn’t necessarily certain over comms. “You are entering restricted airspace. State your designator and intentions.”

“Orange Three, this is Bold Brezak, friendlies, friendlies, friendlies,” Cassian flicked on the radio.

“Bold Brezak, authenticate red two alpha Sullust,” the voice crackled back.

Cassian flipped open a folded sheet of flimsi and scanned it for a moment, then called back, “Orange Three, Bold Brezak. Authenticate green five green Bespin.”

A pause, and then she spoke in a significantly warmer tone. “Authenticated. Welcome to the party, Bold Brezak.” The weapon lock indicator flipped off as Orange Three stopped targeting them with her missiles, and Bodhi let out the breath he’d been holding.

“Happy to make it here,” Cassian replied dryly. Bodhi snorted and rolled his eyes. From the right, an X Wing materialized from the clouds, sliding smoothly into escort formation on their wing. From the corner of his eye, Bodhi saw Jyn shift to lean against the starboard viewscreen, watching the X Wing intently.

“Looks like you already had your first dance,” the pilot commented, and flashed her winglights at them in a standard heads-up pattern. “Carbon scoring on your belly, and you’re streaming smoke on the port side.”

“We had more dance partners than we expected,” Cassian replied, his mouth twitching into a brittle, brief smile. “I hope you can lead us home.”

“On my wing,” the pilot ordered, and pulled slightly ahead to take lead. Cassian gestured at the comm and then to Bodhi, who flipped the switch to his mouthpiece and responded, “Bold Brezak, on your wing,” carefully setting his formation distance.

It was only another five minutes to land, and Bodhi took deep breaths and tried to keep his mind on the task at hand. Orange Three didn’t attempt to comm again until they were in sight of the landing pad, and then she only threw a “Nice flying with you. Orange Three breaking away,” before snapping sharply to a ninety-degree angle and fading into the clouds. The X Wings’ lights were the last thing visible through the driving snow, and then she was gone. Bodhi turned his eyes back into the cockpit and focused on landing. Someday, he told himself. Until then, he was good with being the pilot to Jyn and Cassian’s team. Come to think of it, he was downright glad to have been their pilot on this mission – they could have dropped out of hyperspace into a face-full of air combat with some random pilot who maybe wouldn’t have understood how important it was to get them to the ground safely.

“I need to find Sim Kelrune,” Cassian muttered, apparently to himself. Bodhi glanced at him as he maneuvered the creaking freighter to the landing pad. “Three five twenty-seven and a third twist,” he went on more or less under his breath. The man had somehow produced a handful of flimsi from apparently thin air, and was already buried in it, shuffling through the documents and scrolling through a datapad he had balanced on his knee. Bodhi resisted the urge to roll his eyes again as he set the freighter down and depressurized the interior, matching the atmosphere and unlocking the exterior doors.

“I know where I need to go,” Jyn said quietly from Bodhi’s other side, and he jumped as he realized she was leaning over his shoulder opposite of Cassian and staring out the viewscreen at the thick snow slanting almost sideways in the wind. “See you.” The white snow seemed to catch and reflect in her eyes, giving them a strange shine that Bodhi found himself disliking.

“Wear your scarf,” he joked weakly. “It’s, uh, a bit chilly.” She nodded without looking, and started to back away. A faint alarm, as nebulous and uncertain as the ship alarms were loud and insistent, went off in Bodhi’s head when she kept her eyes straight forward and her voice low. Too low to interrupt Cassian’s muttering. That meant something, right? Something not good? Bodhi reached up and touched a finger to her elbow. “Hey,” he said earnestly. “Um, be careful? Okay?”

She blinked, then slowly turned her head to look at him. The blankness in her face softened into something more familiar, and she gave him a small smile.  _Dancing in the darkness, we are all of us lost together,_  his mother always sang that part sadly,  _little lights shining on this dark night._  “I will,” Jyn promised. “See you soon,” she repeated, and this time sounded like she meant it.

Then she turned away without another backward look. Bodhi glanced to the side incredulously, but Cassian didn’t look up from his datapad, his face set in a frown of concentration. How important was this recon? It had seemed pretty simple in the brief. And even if it was the most important mission since Scarif, Jyn wouldn’t just leave without saying goodbye to Cassian, would she? And Cassian surely didn’t intend to just  _let_ her…did he?

Jyn vanished as silently as a wraith into the back of the ship, and Cassian flipped over a page of flimsi.

Apparently, he did. That was…weird. It was weird, right? Had he ever seen them do that, even before Scarif, before…everything?

“So,” Bodhi ventured cautiously. “We, uh, made it.”

“Yes.”

“Wow, it’s, uh, it’s pretty, you know, pretty nasty out there.”

“Dark season,” Cassian agreed distantly, frowning as he tapped at something flashing on his datapad. Bodhi guessed that they had connected with the local holonet, and Cassian was probably trying to get updates on…the locations of the people he needed, or local news, or something. Something important. Really important. More important than his team, or goodbyes, or –

Bodhi flipped the last of the shut-down switches and checked that the low-energy heaters were working. It would do them no good to let the engines sit totally idle and get clogged with ice. What if they needed a quick take off? He tapped his fingers gently on the console as he waited for the indicators to go green, and tried not to watch the darkness for a small, shivering figure fighting her determined way through the storm towards the front lines of a battle he knew was happening somewhere nearby.

“I see you have managed to land without destroying us all in an impressive fireball,” Kay said in what was almost an approving tone as he stomped back into the cockpit.

“He is the pilot for a reason,” Cassian replied with a faint note of amusement, still not looking up.

“And I see Jyn had already departed for her objective. No point in wasting time, I suppose.”

“What?” Cassian’s head snapped up, the flimsi in his hand falling slack as he scanned the cockpit as if expecting Jyn to pop up from behind one of the chairs.

“Yeah, a few minutes ago, while you were reading,” Bodhi said, a touch reproachfully, but the moment Cassian swung that too-sharp gaze on him, the pilot winced and ducked his head, fiddling with the console controls. He hadn’t meant to sound judgmental, not really, but…it was Jyn. And Cassian. They were some of the only people even remotely resembling a family that he had left, really, even if they didn’t believe in the Force or know the Bright Song or celebrate  _svelo dize_. Not to mention that this was a war zone, no matter how small it was in the grand scheme of the war raging across the galaxy.

And it was bloody dark out there, in the snow where Jyn had gone all alone.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cassian glance down at the pile of documents in his hands, and then out the viewscreen. There was nothing to see, however, but darkness and snow.

“I presume that I will be going with you to meet the commander of the ground forces,” Kay said into the small silence.

“Yes,” Cassian cleared his throat, and took a long, slow breath. “Yes, Kay, with me.” He turned a carefully blank face to Bodhi that put Jyn’s stony expression to shame. “Are you alright to find the hangar and speak to the squadron commander?”

“Flight Lieutenant Kellemund,” Bodhi recited dutifully. “Orange Squadron. Commander of Rebel Air Forces in the Velm system.”

Cassian nodded, and then despite his cold expression, his eyes flicked back to the viewport.

“She said she’d see us soon,” Bodhi offered tentatively. “And she will probably, um, probably check in on, you know,” he gestured to his ear vaguely, “comms.”

The lines of Cassian’s face twisted into a pained grimace, and then smoothed again. “Of course,” he said in his short, sharp, professional voice. He pushed himself out of the copilot seat and Bodhi caught a glimpse of his dark eyes before he turned to leave the ship.  _In this dark season,_  his mother sang in his memories,  _a light to your darkness, always the light in your eyes._

“Cassian,” Bodhi said, turning to see his friend stopped in the open doorway. “You be careful out there, too, yeah?”

Cassian didn’t turn back, but he sighed and nodded. “Thank you, Bodhi.” And then he, too, was gone.

Kay ducked below the doorsill, pausing to peer back through the frame at Bodhi. “I am at the least risk for physical damage,” he informed the pilot. “The cold here is not severe enough to damage my structure.”

Despite himself, Bodhi laughed. “Take care anyway, my friend.”

“Your well wishes are unnecessary but appreciated,” Kay replied calmly as he stalked out after Cassian.

Bodhi turned back to the console, making sure the locks and failsafes were all in place, and shot one final dubious look through the viewscreen.  _We are all bright lights,_ his mother sang, and Bodhi hummed along with her as he clambered to his feet and went looking for his winter gear.  _We are all a light to the darkness, in this night, on this festival of light._

 

\--

 

Cassian walked into the building where he was meant to meet Sim Kelrune and found himself facing his immediate, messy death.

Veladine Rebel Forces headquarters was in, of all things, an old gymnasium that made Cassian think unhappily of his childhood school on Fest. The double doors created a sort of airlock against the chill, and the locals had doubled them into a security point. The Human female who greeted Cassian and K2SO huddled in between the two sets of thick doors in what looked like two scarves and three thin, patchy coats, her boots and gloves worn thin and her trousers patched in at least two places. There was nothing patchwork about the huge rifle she pointed directly at Cassian’s face as he entered, however.

 _Fuck me, they’ve got a DLT-19 at a guard station._ The heavy blaster still had Imperial markings on the barrel, too, and he could see a crate of the thumb-sized cartridges folded into long belts just behind her ankle. If she wanted to, this woman could blast more holes than a cheese grater into anything within a fifty meter radius in  _seconds._  She could blow a man’s entire skull to pulp with one gentle trigger squeeze. That weapon was designed to mow down rampaging wampa, and she had the business end of it less than a handspan from his right eye.

“Your business?” she asked in a creaky voice that dragged Cassian’s eyes from the cold, black abyss inside that barrel up to her face. Her face was a web of deep wrinkles and thin white scars on weathered skin. Her body was too well hidden by her many layers of shabby clothes, but her back was definitely hunched with age and probably the strain of the huge blaster. Heavy crow’s feet etched around her sunken eyes, which despite their obvious age were bright and sharp as a crow’s, and her hands held the big weapon steady as a rock. She looked like one of the  _abuelas_  from his childhood, who clucked and scolded and taught the children of Fest to handle blasters too big for their small fingers. Her snow-speckled hood and grim stare smashed against the wall he had been so carefully building around his memories these last few days, as he always did around this time of the year. Like the old grandmothers, she was ancient and fragile and could kill him in a heartbeat.

The ice that had formed in his eyebrows and hair as he shoved through the snow was already starting to melt, and dripped down into his face. Cassian blinked and licked the cold water from his lips before he said the traditional greeting for the dark season on Veladine, as calmly but distinctly as he could manage. “ _Dral vaa’tur at gar_ , elder. I am Eduardo Strax, the contractor. Sim Kelrune hired me to consult, and my business is her business.”

The barrel didn’t waver, and behind him, Kay made a faint but distinct creaking noise that indicated he was preparing to leap forward. The noise felt oddly truncated, and Cassian realized a beat later that he was listening for the follow-on sound of Jyn drawing her truncheons.

“Consultant,” she said slowly, weighing the word as she looked him over. Cassian tried not to feel like he was five years old and hiding a stolen cookie in his pocket. Finally, the old woman’s face cracked open into a hard smile. “Well,” she grumbled, dropping the barrel to point at the ground, “Took you long enough, son.”

Cassian felt his shoulders drop slightly in relief, but he kept his expression neutral and his posture straight. “Thank you,” he said politely as the old woman shuffled slightly the side to let him pass. She eyed Kay as he clanked by, but though Cassian watched carefully from the corner of his eye, she made no attempt to stop him from entering as well.

Cassian had been on dozens of recon missions like this for the Rebellion in his time – sent as a “consultant” to newly fledged uprisings that lasted longer than a day or two. He presented himself as a go-between, a third party interested only in a paycheck from the Alliance; even the leadership of the local rebel groups never knew that he was a member of the Alliance himself. Ostensibly, he was there to reach out to the new groups, to give them a line to the Alliance and help them get their movement going against an always more powerful foe. In reality, his job was to assess whether or not the group in question was an acceptable investment for the Alliance’s precious resources.

He grimaced slightly at the taste of the old, familiar phrasing. In his experience, there were two kinds of uprisings: the kind that had disaffected local officials and disgruntled military officers backed with solid supply lines and appropriated equipment, and the kind that was, in essence, a bunch of angry poor people with rocks and their parent’s old blaster from the Clone Wars. If they were the first kind, the professional kind, then Cassian established a line of communication with the leadership and Alliance Command, and helped fill in what holes they could in their logistics or strategy. If they were the second kind, he recruited whomever he could convince to leave their home world for the sake of the larger, long term fight. If they were somewhere in between, Cassian was high ranking enough to have “discretionary decision privileges.”

He had left some of these missions empty handed before. Not many - he was damn good at what he did, and had long ago learned never to throw away a useful resource no matter how meager…but there had been some.

He hadn’t told Jyn about any of them, yet. He wasn’t sure what expression she would make when he did. He wasn’t sure he could stand to see it.

That thought, and the memories of those failed missions, amplified the sour taste on his tongue. A year ago, he would have grit his teeth and forced himself to set it aside. And part of him still wanted to do exactly that, because the Alliance had even fewer resources to spare now than it had a year ago, after the Battle of Scarif, the Death Star’s destruction of Alderaan, and the Battle of Yavin. A year ago, Cassian (or someone like him) would have been on Veladine within days of their local uprising. Now, it had taken almost five months to get here, and he’d only been sent because they had managed to last so long.

 _They_  had been sent, Cassian corrected himself. His team, all here on this frozen war-torn world together. They had scattered across the surface, with Bodhi and Jyn taking some of the work that he would have done entirely on his own, before.

The sourness seemed to grow even more pronounced in his mouth at the thought of his team spread across the planet as he stomped his cold way into the headquarters. Normally, the knowledge that there were people he trusted to help him made him feel warmer, calmer. Today, for some reason, it was having the opposite effect as he strode down the narrow, chilled hallway from the building entrance to the main gymnasium. He didn’t have time to turn the feeling over and examine it, however, because at that moment he pushed through the last door and found himself in exactly the scenario he had hoped not to find.

He swept his eyes over the packed, bustling gymnasium, at the faded, mismatched clothes and the blankets piled near the walls, the rickety droids tottering between old, uneven tables and pop-up camp beds that filled most of the floor and yet still failed to hide the stains and scratches of the wood. A few sheets had been hung around a small corner of the gym, and he could just see someone dressed in a dirty medical officer’s smock shuffling between a few metal cots. Various rifles and a few bright red crates marked DANGER: ORDNANCE poked out of the hodge-podge of people and debris. It looked more like a heavily armed refugee camp than a war center. Sounded like one, too, with people speaking in low murmurs and tired grumbles, moving carefully through the maze of gear and blankets and fellow rebels.

The rebels had also strung up long strands of colored beads from every possible hook or upright surface. The florescent lights of the gymnasium filtered and fractured through the glass, making them appear to glow slightly. The area brief had mentioned that this was a popular tradition during the Festival of Light, and made some vague comment about the beads symbolizing those who had died during the year. There were a lot of beads.

On Fest, they had carved delicate ice sculptures and placed bright lights inside them, to make them shimmer like jewels, or stars. Cassian shook his head slightly to banish that thought before it could take root. Not the time. Not the place. There was work to do.

The only thing in this mess that looked in any way official was the huge, colorful, beaded banner of white cloth hanging from the rafters and covering almost the entirety of one wall. There were so many designs along the top that the cloth itself was nearly obscured, but nearer the bottom, larger and larger white spaces appeared, and the last several hand spans were unadorned entirely. “The Banner of Den Velmor,” Kay said over the subdued noise of the crowded gym, and raised one metal arm to point. Cassian noted the slight grinding noise from his joint; whatever he said, this brutal weather was just as hell on Kay’s joints as it was on the rest of them. “It details the rise of the royal house of Velmor along the top, and the ancestry and supposed deeds of the people who live on this planet are stitched in beneath it.”

“Nothing ‘supposed’ about it, friend,” a new voice said from Cassian’s left. He turned to meet the weary but friendly gaze of a young Human woman with short-cropped green hair and bags under her dark eyes. “The Banner is our history and our truth,” she said with a smile worn thin from fatigue and stress. “We weave our dead into the tapestry and so they are never gone from us,” she added in the slight sing-song cadence of someone reciting a childhood lesson. “ _Dral vaa’tur,_ Mr. Strax. Welcome to the Veladine Resistance.”

“Sim Kelrune?” Cassian asked, extending his hand to grasp her offered wrist and smiling politely as she returned the grip. She nodded, but didn’t elaborate, her eyes wandering back to the great white banner with it’s many colorful figures. Her shoulders were straight and her jaw set, but Cassian recognized the careful, too-still way she held herself at odds with the restless movements of her fingers, which picked and twisted at her clothes absently. He looked and saw exhaustion, grief, the grim sensation of watching every hope dim and flicker out like stars dying in the night sky, and the increasingly desperate search for another light to look at, another star on which to pin her hopes.

He knew the feeling.

(In the back of his memory, Jyn’s eyes seared into him and her voice echoed around the U Wing,  _it isn’t too late. We can beat the people who did this_  and despite himself he stepped a little closer.)

Cassian pushed away the memory, and the faint, tangled wisp of fear and guilt and anger that snarled suddenly in his chest. He focused instead on making his face as calm and reassuring as he could. “I understand that you are the leader of the resistance,” he said. “What is your official title?”

The woman turned back to him, and her weak smile turned vaguely ironic. “’Commander’ will do, Mister Strax.”

“Very well, Commander Kelrune,” Cassian said formally. “Shall we move to your command station?”

The smile on Kelrune’s face soured around the edges, then smoothed. “Right,” she muttered. “Command station. This way, please.” She lead him on a winding path through the tables and beds. His heart sank with every step, because the more he saw of this operation, the less of a… _good investment_ these people seemed.

But they had made it for four months, in the dark and the snow, against a powerful enemy. He knew all too well what kind of determination that took, and what kind of sacrifice it required. He could look a little closer. He could give them a chance.

“Sim!” A solidly built Human with a fitted black headscarf that jarred wildly with their rough, patchwork clothing stepped out from behind yet another thin curtain (a bedsheet, slightly stained with rusty red Human blood) and stretched out their hand to the Commander of Veladine Rebel Forces. “I thought you were still sleep - ” Abruptly, they caught sight of Cassian and went still as a deer sighting a predator – or perhaps, Cassian corrected himself, watching the newcomer’s eyes scan him from head to toe and their hand slip inside their jacket for the blaster they had obviously hidden there, better to say  _as still as a lothal-tiger sighting prey_.

“Mr. Strax, this is Zun Elatar,” Kelrune shot a slanted glance at the newcomer, and then added quickly, “Lieutenant Elatar.”

“Your second?” Cassian guessed, although he had a feeling that things were much more complicated than that.

“No,” Elatar said immediately, and then confirmed his suspicions by deliberately placing themself between Cassian and Kelrune and widening their stance to an almost challenging brace. “Her personal security chief.” The stance, the words, the way Elatar met his eyes with a flinty scowl – Cassian was only surprised that he wasn’t staring down yet another blaster barrel. Elatar had at least two that he could mark, and a blade tucked into their left boot.  It was well hidden, but Cassian was an expert nowadays on finding knives in clothing. Behind him, Kay whirred softly.

“Zun,” Kelrune chided softly. “They are guests.”

“They are brokers,” her bodyguard snorted (more than bodyguard, judging by the gentle tone of Kelrune’s voice, the hand she brushed against Elatar’s shoulder, and the way Elatar seemed to relax slightly under the touch). “They get paid to get us in touch with the Alliance, but who’s to say the Empire won’t just pay them more to betray us?” Their lips drew back, and their straight, dark eyebrows lowered. “They are just carrion-feeders, gorging on the war.”

“Well, that’s rude,” Kay said with great disdain. “I don’t eat.”

Elatar snorted again, and Cassian shot Kay a warning glance over his shoulder. Then he turned to the glowering bodyguard and asked quietly, “And are you carrion, Lieutenant Elatar?”

Their lip curled slightly, but the expression was more defiance than disgust. “Not yet,” they ground out. “Don’t let the smell fool you.”

“Zun,” Kelrune said after a beat. “If the Alliance is willing to help us, we cannot afford - ” She broke off, shot Cassian a closed look and then concluded in a firm voice, “We will at least consider his proposals.”

Elatar stared at him a moment longer, their mouth working as if they were chewing on their tongue, and then they stepped slowly to the side to allow him passage. “Not the droid,” they ordered firmly as Cassian moved to follow Kelrune into her ‘command center.’

“I am Mister Strax’s personal security chief,” Kay said in his most uncompromising tone. “I will remain as far from him as you remain from your commander.”

“That is fair,” Kelrune said before anyone else could respond. “Shall you both wait here, or come inside?”

Elatar chewed on their tongue again for a moment, and then with a curt nod, swept through the hanging sheet and took up position behind Kelrune. Cassian glanced back and met Kay’s optics, then they both walked in after the rebel leader.

It was significantly warmer in the small, sectioned off command center. He assumed this must be why the medical station was also situated over here, just a few hanging bedsheets away. There seemed to be a powerful heat source just behind the nearest wall of the gym. Elatar saw him looking at the wall and rubbing his hands, and they half-snarled, “The bead maker. We managed to steal one from the hospital and stuff it in the offside gym.”

 _Bead maker_  seemed like an odd thing to devote so much precious space to, but perhaps it had some other value that Cassian hadn’t considered. And at any rate, the excess heat was more than welcome. His fingers were so cold that he could imagine them turning to ice and snapping off the way his uncle used to tease him they would back on –

Not the time.

“We are already grateful,” Kelrune began as Cassian took up a position on the opposite side of the folding table on which were spread datapads, wrinkled charts covered in scrawled unit positions, and a cupful of what looked like large colored glass beads. “So grateful, for the X Wings who came over from the hidden base on Velmor.” She sketched a rough pattern with one fingertip over the most weathered of the charts, a large-scale map of the local terrain, Cassian figured. “They alone gave us the air support we needed to reclaim the Haferton district and the northern boroughs in the city. But now the Empire has enough TIE fighters in the system to keep the X Wings busy in air to air combat,” she gestured vaguely up to the ceiling, and Cassian nodded and forced away the abrupt memory of his team’s emergence from hyperspace over Veladine. 'Busy' was a bit of an understatement - more like 'sphincter-clenching madness.' But he digressed. Kelrune was still talking, still gesturing vaguely at the ceiling as if she could see the fighter craft above them. “And they still have TIE fighters left over to run blitz bombing on us. The snow is too thick for accurate or repetitive strikes, and their bombs fall out into the snow fields as often as on anything strategic, but every hit they do make costs us dearly.”

Kelrune leaned on the table top with both hands, her head bowing as if under a great weight. “We can’t continue under these conditions,” she confessed with a faint quaver in her voice. “They are ripping us apart, stitch by stitch.”

Behind her, Elatar stepped closer and pressed their hand against Kelrune’s lower back, watching her intently. Elatar met his gaze then, and their eyes were so fierce that for a moment Cassian imagined the deep brown suddenly flashing a bright green. Then Elatar turned back to Kelrune. “We’re still here,” they said flatly into the silence.

Kelrune looked up and the corner of her mouth twitched up slightly. “Yes. We are still here,” she echoed.

Cassian saw the opening, and acted instinctively. He mirrored Kelrune's expression, letting his eyes flick from Elatar and back, then tinged his voice with just enough humor to sound affable without being abrasive. “Not carrion yet, Commander.” Then, before the faint sense of connection could be lost, he said briskly, “Before we discuss what I can offer, perhaps we should discuss what you need?” That was as neutral as he could be - inquiry, but not promise, hope, but not relief. 

“ _Everything_ , from the look of it,” Kay said a little peevishly from behind him.

“Medical supplies,” Kelrune answered quickly. “Fuel and weapons for the X Wings. We’re alright on food supplies, because we have control of some of the major Dark Season caches, but if we lose those areas, we’ll be desperate there, too.”

“Thread,” Elatar chimed in. “Yarn.”

Cassian raised his eyebrows at that. He’d met with dozens of rebel groups, all desperately in need of (as Kay so impolitely said)  _everything_  – but this was the first time anyone had asked for  _yarn_.

“For blankets and warm clothes,” Kelrune explained, catching his surprise.

“You could simply ask for blankets and warm clothes,” Cassian tried to keep any judgement from his tone, merely stating the obvious.

Kelrune nodded slowly, and then said in a pained tone, “It’s the Festival of Light, Mister Strax.”

 _Ah yes, that explains everything,_  Cassian thought with slight impatience. He stayed silent, however, tilting his head in a pleasant invitation to continue, and Kelrune obliged.

“On Veladine, the Festival of Light is a time to light the candles, sew the dead, and gift your loved ones with warm clothes and warm words.” She smiled, though her eyes were shadowed. “We cannot light the candles this year, I’m afraid, not with the blackouts to prevent TIE bombs from finding us. But that makes our other traditions that much more important.”

Cassian blinked at her. “You…sew the dead,” he repeated carefully, almost certain he had misheard.

Elatar made a derisive noise in their throat. Kelrune frowned at them, and they hunched their shoulders slightly in mute apology. “We sew their bead to the Banner, Mister Strax,” Kelrune clarified. She gestured to the cup of colored beads on her table. Her voice lowered for a moment, the exhaustion and grief creeping back into it. “There are a lot to add, this year.”

“And then we give the still-living gifts to keep them warm,” Elatar broke in a little harshly, their eyes on Kelrune’s hunched shoulders. “To celebrate that they are alive and that we,” they paused, cleared their throat, and dropped their eyes to the floor, “that we love them.”

Kelrune turned to look back at them, the weary lines of her face softening with tenderness, the tiny smile back on the corner of her lips.

Part of Cassian – the part that never really switched off, the part that analyzed faces, bodies, and voices constantly whether he really wanted to or not – watched Kelrune’s smile and thought _, ah_. He’d guessed as much.

Another, larger part of him was suddenly sitting in the common space of the Bold Brezak, staring at his empty caf mug as Jyn picked her words as carefully as a woman in a minefield picked her steps.  _Bed’s been a bit cold without you_ , she said in that too-casual tone.

 _Warm clothes and warm words_ , Kelrune had murmured, and Cassian’s heart constricted painfully tight in his chest as he realized that for the past several days, he had given Jyn neither. Something cold pressed against his palm, and he realized that his hand was shoved into his pocket, his fist curled around the comm that linked him directly to Jyn, his thumb brushing against the call button.

 _We need to be professionals_ , he’d said, or some similar garbage, all while Bodhi’s melancholy song played in his ear. Jyn had simply stood up and walked away, and Cassian had thrown himself right back into his reports and data sheets, back to the war and the cause and the endless list of things that needed to be done. He hadn’t even noticed when she left for the front lines. He hadn’t let himself notice.

Across from him, Elatar’s grim face twitched briefly into a smile that was clearly just for Kelrune, a secret shared between them, a world only they could enter. They weren’t professional soldiers, that was obvious to him, but they had held their own for months. Perhaps, then, he had been entirely wrong about what Veladine needed.

Or perhaps he had only been wrong about what  _he_  needed. There weren’t that many people in his life who offered Cassian more than battles to fight and weapons to fight them with, but Jyn… she was no more experienced with this sort of thing than he was, but she had been brave enough to try anyway. And Cassian had been so fucking busy forcing away memories of ice sculptures and lights that he’d forced away everything else, as well. He was no better than Bodhi – no, he was worse than Bodhi, who had sung his songs and fretted with his sleeves but never once shut them out. And now Jyn was out on the front lines in the dark, and the last words he’d spoken to her had been -

“Perhaps,” Commander Kelrune turned back to the table and spoke, cutting into his dark thoughts, “we should give you a complete break down of our current assets, Mister Strax.”

“Yes,” Cassian cleared his throat and placed his empty hand on the table top to help him regain his balance. “Please start with the current locations of all your active battle units.”

-

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My headcanons about the [Festival of Light](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Festival_of_Light) in this story tie into my headcanons about it in ‘you give me something’ (although you absolutely don't need to read it to get any of this, there are just some shout outs and references for those who have). In canon, the Festival is a holiday in Naboo to celebrate their decision to join the Old Republic roughly 900 years ago…however, it _could_ be a widespread galactic tradition – all former Republic planets celebrate the Festival in their own way, modeled after Jedha (who did it first, thousands of years ago, because the Jedi started their order in Jedha and so were the first to form the Republic). _So_ everyone has a Festival of Light in some form, even Imperial planets, because to overthrow millennia of such a huge tradition is silly. Instead they simply say “the Festival marks the date that our planet decided to peacefully work with the others, etc” and remove all reference to the Republic. 
> 
> I made up Bodhi's Mum's song. You can pick whatever tune you like for it, but it sounds a bit melancholy, especially if you don't know the words (a bit like "Silent Night" or "I'll Be Home For Christmas").
> 
> The [DLT-19 heavy blaster](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/DLT-19_heavy_blaster_rifle) was originally an Imperial weapon, used by death troopers mostly. How the Veladine rebels got their hands on a few would be a whole different story.
> 
> Veladine speaks a variant of Mando’a (so if hover text doesn’t work for you, you can translate the Mando’a words in this story [here](https://lingojam.com/mandoa-englishtranslator)). They speak regional Mando’a because colonialism and ancient history and reasons. Look, not everything gets a detailed backstory, even in my convoluted head.
> 
> Also, the Banner is called “Banner of Den Velmor” because of the Royal House of Velmor. [Velmor](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Velmor) is a neighboring planet to Veladine, with a royal family and a whole ton of drama involving Luke Skywalker and a long lost heir and Imperial traitors and so on. But that’s a few years down the road yet, and right now, Velmor is only significant because a lot of Veladine locals like to tell stories about how they are mostly descendant from Velmor immigrants, with rumors that one of those ancestors was of the royal house themselves. Okay, I take back everything I said above about how I don’t have a detailed backstory for _everything_.
> 
> I could not resist giving myself a little cameo during Bodhi’s part. Self insert OC, ho! (Forgive me)


	2. We Are All Of Us Lost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're not on mobile, the hover text function works pretty well for the alien languages. If you are on mobile, I don't think it will, but the story should explain or at least heavily imply what it all means. If you're still curious, there is a pretty decent mandolorian translator [here](https://lingojam.com/mandoa-englishtranslator). (It's mostly just formalities or cursing).

When Jyn was thirteen, she had a sudden growth spurt that stretched all her clothes far too tight, pulled her shirt sleeves irritatingly high over her wrists and left her ankles embarrassingly exposed above her ratty, fraying socks. The Partisans had been deep in the jungles of Onderon at the time, and there was food and water aplenty in the jungles but not much in the way of clothes. The weather had been warm and humid, and the constant brush of air against her exposed skin had driven Jyn to distraction. It had felt like weak, clammy fingers constantly grabbing at her wrists and ankles, poking in the openings of her collar and slipping along her lower back where her too-short shirt tail kept pulling untucked. Trudging through the howling wind and the lifeless roads between the abandoned buildings of Veladine’s streets made Jyn feel oddly similar, like she was thirteen again, small and solitary and uncomfortable in her own skin.

She was an adult now, and well past any growth spurts (regretfully), but the freezing cold wind of Veladine found its way into her much-better-fitted clothing as easily as the humid breeze of Onderon did. Of course, that was where the similarity ended: Onderon was hot and moist and sticky as a young lover’s hands, Veladine was cold and dry and bitter as an old miser’s heart.  The wind here sliced through every tiny gap in her clothes, iced over her night vision goggles and whipped her scarf around her head no matter how tightly she tied it. In the perpetual inky blackness of the overcast, moonless night, it was nearly impossible to see anything except the clumps of ice forming in her eyelashes.

So Jyn felt only a mild embarrassment when she found the rebel trench by falling into it.

One moment she was struggling to push through knee-deep snow, and the next, the ground dropped out from under her boot and she pitched forward in total darkness, throwing her arms over her head and curving her body in an attempt to reduce some of the damage. Her night vision goggles jolted down her face and hung uselessly around her neck, and the transition to pure darkness would have blinded her utterly if she wasn’t already staring into the bottomless black abyss as she plummeted face first into it. Briefly, she recalled the spiked pits the Partisans used to dig under the thick leafy forest carpet of Laimur IV, and the many Imperial bodies she had seen twisted and impaled at the bottom –

\- and then she struck something soft and lumpy that shouted with outrage and flapped humanoid arms.

“ _Enemy! We are attacked! Enemy!_ ” The lump bellowed in a hoarse, panicked voice, and awkward arms flailed at Jyn’s head and shoulders weakly. She tucked her chin and rolled away, until she was on her feet with her long vibroblade in one hand and her truncheon in the other. “ _Help! Help! Enemy! On these fields at last I fall! Enemy!_ ”

The whine of several blasters powering up echoed in the dark space around her, audible even over the screeching of the lump. The faint green gleam of night vision goggles flared into life in a ragged circle around her, like glowing eyes peering bodiless out of the shadows.

“Shut it, Heric,” a new voice snapped, female, furious.

“I am attacked!” the lump shrieked insistently. “Slain by the foe in the cold embrace of the dark seaso-”

“If you were dead, nerf-brain,” the exasperated female cut him off, “then you couldn’t be karking howling about it!”

Abruptly, the wailing stopped. “…could be if I wanted,” Heric the hysterical lump muttered sulkily.

“Right,” the angry woman said when silence reigned in the trench again. “On your knees, weapons down, state your name.”

Slowly, Jyn crouched and set her knife and truncheon on the ground, but she stayed on the balls of her feet and propped her elbows on her thighs casually.

“You hear me?” the sharp, angry voice demanded. The weird acoustics of the trench made it hard to pinpoint her voice, but the green glow of NVGs nearest to Jyn’s right side wobbled in time with the words. “I said on your knees and state - ”

“To fight and oppose you and your forces, by any and all means at our disposal,” Jyn said quietly. Unbidden, her mind conjured up the last time she had said these words, sitting on a hospital bed on Yavin IV with Cassian’s fingers wound tight between hers. “To refuse any Imperial law contrary to the rights of free beings,” she continued, pushing away the memory of his thumb drawing small, sweet circles against the back of her hand.

The green glow on her right jolted, and then moved closer. Jyn waited, still and silent, ignoring the faint hum of primed blasters surrounding her, ignoring the cold snow that was melting slightly into her collar and around the edges of her gloves.

Then the sharp voice spoke again, halting and uncertain, “To...bring about your destruction and the...and the destruction of the Galactic Empire.”

“To make forever free all beings in the galaxy,” Jyn replied casually, as if this were a pleasant conversation on a sunny day in the market.

“To those ends,” the sharp voice answered, and Jyn’s was not the only voice which joined her in a murmuring chorus, “we pledge our property, our honor, and our lives."

In the small silence that fell after the last echo died, Jyn said softly, “I am Vastra. Evaluator from HQ.”

“She sounds like an Imp,” another voice muttered from Jyn’s left. She didn’t move, just kept her eyes turned towards the woman.

“If she was an Imp, she’d have come in shooting,” the woman snapped after a moment. Then, cautiously, she added, “I’m Sergeant Cari. Welcome to the east trenches.”

“I’m going to put on my NVGs now, Sergeant Cari,” Jyn lifted her hand painstakingly slowly to her neck, and then equally painstakingly slowly settled her night vision goggles back over her eyes. The darkness around her transformed from an endless abyss to a somewhat cramped tunnel-like structure, with rows of poorly-dressed humanoids of all kinds hunched up against the walls on either side. Jyn did a quick sweep down the left, and then the right.

A lumpy man with multiple scarves wrapped around his thick neck waved listlessly to her as she glanced past him. “Could have been an enemy,” he grumbled. She ignored him, taking in the rebel front line troops, mentally cataloging her report for Cas- for the Rebellion.

Mismatched, mostly handmade clothes. Old fashioned haircuts, worn boots that had seen years of hard work before these months of combat. Dirt stains so old that they were now part of the pattern of the fabric or the skin which they marked. The people wearing NVGs mostly had them strapped on wrong, hanging precariously on their faces. They stood in sloppy stances with their arms crossed around themselves for warmth, and almost no one positioned to see outside the trench to the snowy world beyond.

She could see rifle barrels, pistol blasters, and even a few stun prods and vibroblades of all makes and models in their hands, only a few of which were still pointed in her direction. With a mild grimace, she noted that if anyone had actually opened fire on her in this trench, they would have been more likely to hit their fellow rebels than the incoming stranger.

Miners. Service workers. Janitors and waitresses and… _firza e vuoto_ , even lanky adolescents with wide eyes and nervous fingers on their unfamiliar triggers. Not soldiers. Not even local law enforcement, apparently.

A second quick sweep of the scene told her that this tunnel was a carefully constructed semi-underground street, with all the traffic signals, signs, and graffiti of any city’s main thoroughfares. A thin aluminum awning (which had given way under her weight) covered most of the street, with only a narrow gap between the roof and the outside, elevated streets.

“We walk on the upper streets in light season,” a new, younger voice told her, someone stationed nearby the still sulking lump, “but dark season traffic is all down here out of the wind.” A thin young man was perched on the stairs leading up to the surface, crouching as he looked out the narrow slit at the snow with his own NVGs held against his face by an awkward hand. “Or it would be, if things were normal.”

 _Trench warfare_ , Jyn thought bitterly. As if this situation wasn’t bloody bad enough, the troops were fighting kriffing trench warfare. She glanced from the lookout boy to the sullen lump and then did a quick scan for Cari. “And the enemy location?”

“Amroth Street, I think,” the boy answered, and then Cari cut him off.

“Eyes on the street, Rahn, or turn the goggles over to someone else.” Rahn jumped and immediately turned back around to peer out again quickly. “The nearest Imps are two streets over, last time we were…engaged,” she stepped close enough that Jyn could see her scowl under the green-tinted goggles. She was an Iktotchi, Jyn noted with some surprise, her almost pure-black skin a striking contrast with her ivory-white horns. She raised one wide, dark hand and jabbed it towards the west, a thin steel chain hung with half a dozen colorful beads swinging out of her sleeve with the motion. “About fifty meters that way.”

“Captain Tanoor?” Jyn asked quietly after the man she’d been sent to find, standing up and moving closer to confer with the sergeant.

Cari shook her head sharply. Her gleaming horns and her broad hands were the only part of her not covered by thickly-knit clothing, and Jyn wondered idly if she felt the cold in either. “I’m down to forty-odd capable in this squad, and another dozen wounded but not critical. Seven critical, including the captain. But every time I try to send a team back with them to HQ, the _dhagaan’arir_ TIE bombers start raining death on us again.”

Jyn smiled with dry amusement at someone calling Imperials “undisciplined,” and then kicked her truncheon from the floor back into her hand. To her credit, Cari tensed but did not jump as Jyn tucked the weapon back into her belt, then flipped her knife onto her booted toe and into her other hand. “How long ago was your last engagement with ground forces?”

Cari opened her mouth, then frowned and glanced up at the wall. “Rahn,” she commanded. “Time since the last scrap?”

“Fifteen hours, thirty two minutes Galactic Standard Time, sarge,” the boy replied immediately, almost cheerfully.

“Kid’s got an amazing internal clock,” Cari muttered out of the side of her mouth to Jyn. “Don’t know how he does it. Even when he goes to sleep, he wakes up knowing what time it is.”

Jyn eyed the boy on his perch, smiling slightly as he straightened his shoulders under her gaze and squinted fiercely out into the snow. “And you have no sign the enemy has moved positions?”

Cari shook her head, her pale horns flashing a little in Jyn’s NVGs. “Rahn can give you a more detailed report.”

Jyn nodded curtly and climbed nimbly up the metal staircase until she crouched on the platform with Rahn. The boy (dark hair that flopped into his face despite his heavy knit cap, and surprisingly blue eyes) adjusted his NVGs and shot her a small, slightly nervous grin. If he tried to straighten his spine any further, Jyn thought with quiet amusement, he was going to crack his back. She settled on her heels for a moment, one finger tapping on her truncheon as she considered him. The boy’s grin faded slightly, and he cleared his throat and looked determinedly back out at the snow. “Your strap is broken,” Jyn said at last.

Rahn pulled his NVGs away from his face long enough to grimace at them. “Yeah. I mean, yes, ma’am.”

“You have enough to foreshorten it?”

She didn’t roll her eyes at his confused silence, simply held out her hand. He glanced down into the trench, but Sergeant Cari had her back to them, talking quietly with another rebel. Tentatively, he set the goggles in Jyn’s outstretched hand. She snapped open the buckle and drew her blade, cutting through the fold backs and readjusting the straps. “Name and rank?”

“Uh, Mieu Rahn,” the boy said. “No rank, though. I’m just, uh, just a soldier.”

 _No,_ Jyn thought, _you’re not. But you will probably die like one, unless someone shapes you up._ “Hook this around the crest of your skull,” Jyn told him, handing back the goggles. “The strap is shorter, so that’s the only way it will balance properly. And focus the outside lens before you focus the inside lens.”

Rahn did as she directed, settling the goggles and smiling a little with delight as they perched on his head without needing to be held. “Awesome,” he muttered under his breath, and then shot Jyn a guilty glance. “Thanks.”

“Report,” Jyn tilted her head towards the snowy landscape outside.

“Oh, uh, no movement in the last seven hours and sixteen minutes. But there were three TIE fighters skimming over the buildings down by Belagost Street,” he pointed to the northwest. “I could see them just over the tops of the buildings.”

“Enemy position?”

“That way,” he pointed west, at a large, imposing building that loomed out of the snow. “I saw lights in the windows once, but we shot a few times that way and they went out. I’ve been watching, but I don’t think anyone’s still in the building. Um, I’m pretty sure they aren’t, anyway. Last X Wing air patrol commed back that they had heat signatures in the street behind the building. So, uh, I guess that’s where the Imps are.”

“Less guessing,” Jyn said sternly. “Say what you know to the best of your ability.”

“Sorry,” he replied, a little crestfallen. His hand crept up to his throat, his fingers digging absently under his coat collar until they wrapped around something hanging from his neck.

Jyn thumped him on the shoulder. “Good analysis.” She should have climbed back down then, moved on to the next trench, the next assessment, but something about the way the boy clutched at his necklace kept drawing her eye. Finally, she asked, “What is that?”

Rahn turned to stare at her for a moment, and then quickly stripped a short chain over his head and held it out. Jyn’s muscles locked for a moment, shocked at the instant trust. As tentatively as he had reached for the NVGs, she took the necklace and held it up to her goggles. It was a simple metal chain, but six colored glass beads decorated it, held apart from one another by what looked like tiny stone beads carved into star shapes. “My family,” Rahn said sadly. “Mom and Dad,” he touched the two red beads with one finger. “Grandpop,” the green bead, “and Granddad,” the orange, “Aunt Maise,” the yellow bead, “and my cousin Sarafi,” the purple. “I carved the little stars from the rocks in the mine,” he added proudly. “Mom said I was good enough to be a sculptor, if I ever went to school for it.”

There had been something in the op brief, something about the locals honoring their dead with beads. Jyn recalled the bracelet on the sergeant’s wrist, and rolled the yellow bead between her fingertips thoughtfully. “Pretty,” she murmured. She ought to hand it back and go about her business now. She had work to do. And yet still she crouched in the cold and the dark and turned the colored beads over in her hand, the edges of her mother’s kyber crystal digging slightly into her collarbone under her layers of shirts and jacket.

 _I’d like us to be focused on the mission, Jyn_.

Jyn’s jaw clenched involuntarily. “Why,” she said sharply, caught herself, cleared her throat. “Why did you pick those colors for them?”

Rahn turned and looked at her with a puzzled frown under his goggles, and then his face cleared. “Oh, uh, no, I didn’t pick…the bead makers choose that. They read the dead person’s records and talk to their surviving family and friends, and then they choose what color to add in with the ashes.” He pointed to the yellow bead in Jyn’s fingers. “Aunt Maise was a teacher, and she liked to keep plants in her house, grow her own herbs and spices. So, um, yellow for learning and growth, I gue- I mean, that’s what that means.”

Jyn raised an eyebrow. “They mix colors with the…ashes.”

“Right, so the beads will be the right color after the compression.” He glanced down into the trench at a distant row of long shapes laid out under tarp. “I hope we can get them back to HQ soon,” he said sadly, looking at the still outlines. “The longer they’re out here, the harder it is to, um, to make the beads right, I’ve heard.”

Carefully, Jyn handed the necklace back. “How many beads,” she asked slowly, not entirely sure she was understanding him correctly, “does one person…make?”

“Depends on how big they are, and how many people want,” Rahn shrugged. “If they had a lot of family, everyone gets one, and the rest are for the Banner. I wonder if they’ve sewn the dead yet for the Festival,” his voice suddenly turned even more mournful than before. “I was hoping to be there when they did.”

“Morbid lad,” the lump suddenly snorted from almost directly beneath them. Both Jyn and Rahn glanced down through the metal platform to see him slumped against the wall beneath the stair. “The Banner is good and important,” the lump called up, pulling one of his many knit scarves closer to his bulbous nose and staring at them through their feet. “But morbid, indeed. The candles are much better, yes? Much more lovely.”

“We can’t light the candles this year,” Rahn said a little repressively. “Have to keep up the blackout.”

“Could if we wanted to,” the lump replied, just as sulky as before. “Down in the trenches.”

“Don’t be dumb, Heric,” Rahn shot back. “The light would glow all along the trench and then the TIE would see us through the snow.”

“I tire of the dark,” Heric muttered, the sulk bleeding into a whine. Under the petulant tone, though, Jyn could hear the low hum of exhaustion, and the rebels around Heric shifted their weight and sighed softly, agreeing with his words if not his attitude.

“Everybody’s tired of the dark,” Rahn grumbled, turning back to look outside. “But that’s the Imps’ fault.”

Jyn blinked at the sudden slash of bitterness in Rahn’s voice. She debated her next move for a moment, wondering if she should talk some more or simply hop down and carry on. She was no good at this sort of thing. Cassian was the one who knew what to say to people when they were upset or angry, he was the one who could smile just the right way and mimic their body language and make them all trust him like an old friend.

But Cassian wasn’t here. Jyn touched her fingertips briefly to the comm on her collar, debated calling him, maybe under the guise of checking in or giving an update. He would talk to her in his professional voice, as distant as any stranger, but it would still be _his_ voice.

 _I’d like us to be focused on the mission, Jyn_.

She dropped her hand. “Why are you here, Mieu?” She asked softly, dipping her voice below what the others should be able to hear, even the lump below them.

Rahn swallowed visibly, his eyes locked on the snow outside though he was clearly no longer tracking anything. “When I was little,” he said in a rough voice, both his hands wrapped tight around the necklace now. “Mom got sick. We went to the hospital – the _Imperial_ hospital, the fancy one they opened when they first took over, and they told her that they could cure her sickness, but she couldn’t apply for government aid to pay for it, because, because,” his voice cracked suddenly, and he coughed to cover it. “Dad was working the mines, and Sarafi had a job at a store to help pay for her school. The hospital people said that because we had two incomes, we couldn’t get money and…”

“She died,” Jyn finished, because this was a story she had heard before. The details changed, but the plot was always the same. Imperials made a big fuss about the quality of their social systems, and never mentioned that only the wealthy Core worlds ever really benefitted from them.

Rahn shrugged again, all sharp angles and awkward limbs, an angry boy glaring at a world that had wronged him. “Yeah. I was little, and Dad tried to protect me from it, but I knew who killed my Mom.” ( _You’re not the only one who lost everything,_ Cassian snarled at her, dripping and pale with rage, and Jyn clenched her fists and stared back because she _knew_ that, she _knew_ , but he was still in the wrong and she wasn’t going to – but that fight was long in the past. They were past it.)

(Weren’t they?)

“And I definitely know who killed my sister and my aunt,” Rahn growled savagely, oblivious to Jyn’s thoughts as one hand dropped from his necklace to his old, clunky blaster. “With their bombs and their soldiers marching through the streets. It was a _peaceful protest_ , I know the news streams said it was a riot and everyone on the holo said they had it coming for attacking the enforcers, but it wasn’t, they _weren’t_ , they were only - ”

He cut himself off, shoving his goggles up suddenly and scrubbing at his face. Jyn turned her face away and looked out at the snow, giving him time to control himself. After a moment, she said simply, “I believe you.”

Rahn froze, and Jyn didn’t need to look to know the expression on his face. She knew exactly what he was feeling, in that moment. ( _They were never going to believe you,_ Cassian stood in the hangar with his hands at his sides, his face as open and honest as she had ever seen. _But I do.)_

 _(I believe you_. _)_

Jyn found her finger on her comm again.

“I figure,” the boy said in a calmer tone, “I figure they would have wanted me to stand up.” He pulled his goggles back down and adjusted them carefully on his face. “ _They_ did.”

“What’s that?” Cari was suddenly on her feet in the trench below. “Does anyone else hear - ?”

Jyn and Rahn’s heads whipped around to the outside, peering through the opening. Jyn strained her ears, but all she could hear was the breathing of the boy beside her and the grumble of the lump as he clambered to his feet.

And then, a low hum, distant as a thunderstorm on the horizon, until it grew into an oncoming roar of –

“TIE bombers!” Rahn shouted, throwing out a hand and pointing northwest. “Incoming TIE!”

The aluminum roof began to vibrate threateningly. Jyn didn’t wait to get her own visual on the Imperial strikers; she slapped her NVGs down to her neck again, hooked an arm around Rahn’s skinny waist, and hurled them both off the platform and down into the trench.

“ _Enemies! We are attacked! We are – oof!_ ” The lump wheezed and crashed to the ground under Jyn and Rahn’s combined weight, his many coats and scarves cushioning their fall.

Jyn shot to her feet while the boy and the lump flailed awkwardly at one another and charged down the trench towards the green glow reflecting on Cari’s ivory horns. “Sergeant!” she shouted over the rising thunder of TIE engines, “Get HQ on the comm, tell them - ”

Then the roaring was in her head, heat lashed at her back, and the world went red, then white, then finally, black.

 

\--

 

“Bold Brezak?” the four-armed sentient who greeted Bodhi at the small side door near the hangar bay called out. His voice was high-pitched but raspy, and Bodhi jumped a little as he stalked closer, yellow eyes latched onto his face like a predator sighting prey. “Pilot of Bold Brezak?”

“That’s me,” Bodhi squeaked slightly as the two-meter tall humanoid in a modified Rebel flight suit towered suddenly over him. The large white and orange patch on the sentient’s chest showed a stitched image of a falling ion bomb with the words “Coming Soon To A Fascist Near You” in blocky orange letters. _Orange Squadron_ , Bodhi thought. _I guess they never got the Cultural Sensitivity briefing._ Then he cleared his throat and straightened. “Mike Yates,” he said carefully, struggling to recall the details of his scandocs clearly despite the large teeth the four-armed being bared at him. “Looking for Flight Lieutenant Patrick Kellemund?” He tried to keep his voice level and commanding, the way Cassian did the few times when he was talking to people in the Rebellion and he wanted them to obey his orders instead of just forget they saw him. But the four-armed being’s teeth were very large, and very close, and Bodhi’s voice curled up into a question despite himself.

“Grissom!” Someone else called from behind the four-armed man. “Lay off him, Grizzle, he’s supposed to be here.”

Grissom sniffed, less a derisive noise and more a deliberate intake of Bodhi’s scent. “Yates,” he growled, as if he were labeling Bodhi’s scent for future reference, then he turned sharply on his heel and loped away.

Behind him, a young Omwati woman with purplish head feathers and a scar across her clearly bionic left eye stepped up to take his place. “Hi!” She said sweetly. “Sorry about Grizzle, he’s a Codru-Ji. They don’t leave their homeworld much,” she warped her voice into a loud stage-whisper that carried across their part of the hangar, “and he was raised by wolves.”

“We are only wolves as children. Adults are humanoid,” Grissom corrected shortly, while the other nearby pilots laughed. “But your people clearly never learned the difference between children and adults, or they would never have let you leave your nest, Bubbles.”

The girl snorted. “One of these days I’m going to light your arse on fire for giving me that name,” she grumbled, then turned back to Bodhi. “It’s Roa, actually, Aifa Roa, but thanks to Griz, everyone calls me Bubbles,” she sighed, then brightened. “Anyway, Patches called in ahead and told us you were coming. We saw you land on the public pad out there. Must have been a shitty walk through the snow.”

“It’s pretty cold,” Bodhi agreed, falling in step with the woman as she led him through the X Wings and Y Wings stationed around the hangar, dodging mechanics and a few astromech droids as they went. “Um, is Flight Lieutenant Kellemund up this way?”

“Oh, no, sorry, Fungus bought it a couple days ago when the fight dragged out of the goo and into orbit,” Roa grimaced. “Now it’s Moby - I mean, Flight Commander Horatio Diche. Just over here, by the caf pots.” The pilot led him under an X Wing with nasty carbon scoring near the cockpit, and then around a stack of crates to a small table set up with three different cheap caf makers bubbling on top of it.

“Moby, I got that civie pilot from the contractors here,” Roa called.

‘Moby,’ it turned out, was a massive Human male with a shock of white-blond hair, a prosthetic leg, and a hard stare that would have terrified Bodhi if he hadn’t seen far worse from Jyn on a regular basis. Bodhi stiffened his spine and stepped forward, his hands held palm up. “ _Dral vaa’tur at gar,”_ he said carefully, remembering the words Cassian had practiced with him. “I am Mike Yates of the Bold - ”

“I’m from Velmor, not Veladine,” Moby cut him off. “And you don’t have to be so formal here, man. Come on, get a caf. Heard you got caught in the sauce up there on your way in. Mike, is it?”

Bodhi took the hot mug gratefully, wrapping both his frozen hands around the ceramic and relaxing slightly. “Yes, pretty messy fight in orbit,” he admitted. “We came out right in the middle of it.”

“Kriff,” Moby shook his huge head. “Welcome and fuck you, right?” He chuckled, and the pilots within hearing all laughed too as Bodhi nodded fervently. Roa leaned her hip up against the table and filled a mug for herself, and a few other rebel pilots lounged on the nearby stack of crates, saluting Bodhi with their own mugs. One of them had her foot propped up on her helmet, and Bodhi noticed with a small start that she had painted “Rogues Forever” on the side.

“For Rogue One,” she called, catching him looking. She tapped her boot heel on the top of the helmet gently. “Had a friend who was in the ground team. Clean here had a cousin,” she waved her caf mug at the pilot half-sprawled beside her on the crates. Clean nodded to Bodhi gravely, and he nodded back, a little dazed.

“Rogue One,” Bodhi repeated.

“Shoe's talking about the guys who went to Scarif,” Roa explained enthusiastically. “Even without air support or _anything_ , because someone had to get the karking Death Star plans. Scuttlebutt is that they’re naming a whole new squadron after them! We heard it on the back channel last month, it’s really _stellar_ , right?”

“Easy, Bubbles,” the woman on the crates, Shoe, held up a hand and grinned. “I mean, you’re right. But easy.” Roa flushed, her purple feathers quivering, and subsided.

“Bubbles loves her scuttlebutt,” another pilot said cheerfully from where he knelt over a slightly rusty astromech. The astromech trilled an affectionate agreement. “And her decorations,” he looked up and grinned widely as Roa groaned. “She’s got them all over the gear locker.”

“It’s just a couple of dust-corn cobs and some fake candles,” she said with exasperation. “It’s the Festival of Light, okay? Big holiday, time of bounty and being virtuous? Why is everyone around here such a humbug about it?”

“It’s not the corn or the candles,” Clean said seriously, though their eyes glinted with amusement. “It’s the virtuous part that gets under our skin.”

“Well, I’m going to celebrate even if all you heathens can’t be bothered,” Roa shrugged a touch defensively.

“We used to hang lanterns,” Bodhi said abruptly. “On Jedha. I put up colored lanterns on my mother’s windows.”

A small silence fell, and Bodhi swallowed and wished he could take back his words. “Jedha, eh?” Moby folded his muscled arms and sighed. “Sorry to hear that, Mike.”

“What, um, what else did you do?” Roa asked tentatively.

“Leave it, Bubbles,” the woman on the crates said, but Bodhi waved a hand at her.

“No, it’s fine, it’s…fine. We, um, we hung lanterns, not just us but, you know, everyone. Colored lamps all over the city, and the vendors, vendors would sell flowers and sweet cakes and their, um, their best lanterns.” He stared down into his caf mug. “And people would gather around the Temple of Kyber at midnight to watch the Priests of the Whills light it up, all different colors. In the morning, there would be a bunch of different services for each major faith in the city.”

 _We went to the sunrise service, my mother and I, and sang the Bright song,_ he thought, but couldn’t bring himself to say. They’d gone every year, buying sweet cakes on the way, until later years when the Empire stripped the Temple and services were banned. He and Mum had still sung the Bright song, of course, quietly in their home, and Bodhi had made a point of buying sweet cakes the night before to eat at sunrise.

This was the first Festival that Bodhi would be singing alone.

(Unless maybe the Guardians were around when he got back to the Alliance. Or if Jyn wanted to learn, because she had the kyber around her neck and he thought maybe he had seen her praying before. He had no idea about Cassian.)

“That sounds beautiful,” Roa said, snapping him out of his thoughts.

“It was,” he agreed, because it was true.

Moby cleared his throat. “Well, they’re under blackout orders out in the trenches,” he said, “But no one says we can’t light a few candles in the hangar - so long as they aren’t near any fuel or ordnance stacks,” he added hastily.

“Well, lookie that, Bubbles,” the male pilot chuckled, his astromech whistling fondly, “guess the Festival Spirit will be visiting Orange Squadron after all. All the good little pilots and mechs will get a Festival wish granted.”

“Well, that leaves you out, Corny,” Shoe called cheerfully. “You’ve been a right arsehole all year.”

The pilots all laughed again, including Corny, and Bodhi felt some of the weight of Jedha’s permanent darkness ease from his shoulders, for now. They were gone, the people, the lanterns, the Temple, but the songs remained, here and there with people like Bodhi and Baze and Chirrut. And anyway, Bodhi thought forcefully, as Roa pointed up to show him the fake candles she had also apparently hung off the catwalk overhead in groups of sevens, it wasn’t like no one else in the galaxy ever lit lanterns.

“So if you want, Mike,” Roa pulled him back down to the ground level as Moby dumped some more caf into his mug. “They’re going to have this whole ceremony tonight where they sew their beads on that big cloth thing and light some candles and sing songs, and I think the Ground Commander said they would break out some extra food rations and let everyone really celebrate? My flight is off the alert by then,” she made a broad gesture to include herself, Shoe, Clean, Corny, and a few other pilots sitting just out of earshot playing cards, “so we’re all going over to see. Want to come with?”

“Yes,” he said, fumbling his caf slightly in his surprise but catching it before it crashed to the hard durastone floor. “Yes, that would, that would be – thank you. I would.” It would be nice to see the candles lit, and maybe see what kinds of songs the people here sang. It would be nice to be around people, even strangers. Cassian and Kay would be there, too, and Bodhi could haul them out to look, whether they liked it or not. (And if Cassian hadn’t pulled his head from his backside and done it already, Bodhi thought with a sudden fierceness, he would demand that they comm Jyn and make sure she was alright.)

“ _Alert Five_ ,” a calm voice suddenly boomed over the intercom, filling the hangar with faint echoes. “ _Alert Five. Hostile activity detected in sector. All units scramble. Alert Five. Hostile activity detected in sector. All units scramble._ ”

“Launch the alert crew!” Moby roared suddenly, a powerful shout that actually managed to drown out the intercom. He slammed his caf mug on the table and took off with surprising speed for a man his size, headed for an old Y Wing that was crawling with ground crew prepping it for immediate launch. The pilots from the crates were also down and running, Shoe cramming her painted helmet over her head as Bodhi watched. Roa smacked Bodhi’s shoulder as she ran by with the flat of her hand.

“That’s me! See you for the Festival, Mike!”

“Just gotta scrap a few fuckheads, first,” Corny bellowed, grinning over his shoulder as he sprinted for a nearby X Wing, the astromech racing along at his heels. “Fire it up, Chief!” he shouted at a golden-furred wookiee, who picked up his astromech as easily as Bodhi had picked up his mug and stuffed the droid into it’s slot on the fighter’s fuselage. On Corny’s other side, the four-armed Grissom was already settled in his Y Wing, engines spooling up with a loud whine and his lips drawn back in a focused snarl.

The hangar was alive with movement, roaring engines, roaring ground crew, and screeching astromechs. Ground power carts zipped between craft, the ordnance loaders danced under and around bombs, missiles, and cannons, taking off the safety rigging and priming the weapons for combat. Orange flight suits disappeared into canopies, and then Bodhi could hear nothing but the ear-shattering roar of a dozen fighter craft lifting off in rapid succession, flashing through the massive hangar doors even before they had yawned full open. The lights of the afterburners were almost immediately lost in the swirling snow, but they could be heard thundering through the darkness for long seconds after they were gone.

Bodhi stood awkwardly by the now abandoned caf table, twisting the mug around in his hands and watching the controlled chaos until the last fighter had vanished and the hangar doors began to groan closed. Only about half of the fighters were gone, and the ground crew bustled around prepping those that remained behind. The new alert crew pilots came trickling out from the upper level where they must have been sleeping, zipping up their suits and rubbing at tired eyes.

Bodhi set his mug down on the table and strode for the door. If things were going to get ugly, he decided, he was going to be somewhere he might actually be able to help. Even if only by making sure Cassian had an extra pair of hands around. And even if his friend had worked out his own problems and commed Jyn, well, Bodhi was going to make him comm her again. Just in case.

 The darkness outside was so thick and frigid that Bodhi hesitated, sudden visions of himself lost and freezing to death in the dark forming in his brain. But while Jyn and Cassian had the goggles, Bodhi had his homing beacon. Shivering already, he fished around in his pocket until he found the little green chrono-sized device, and clicked the button on top, counting to ten under his breath. The beacon vibrated in his hand at ‘eight,’ and a tiny arrow popped up on the screen by ‘ten,’ pointing him towards K2SO’s transmitter. Bodhi clicked again, yanked his hood low over his face and trudged grimly forward as he counted, eyes trained on the arrow, clicking the button and counting to ten, _click_ , one, two, three…

He looked up just in time to stop himself from walking into the wall of the building that rose out of the snow ahead of him. Icicles were forming on his nose, so Bodhi stretched his legs and walked as fast as the snow would allow to the side, following the wall until at last he came to a set of double doors, which he stumbled through gratefully.

For a moment, the dim light of the little space between the outer doors and the inner doors blinded him, but before he could recover, he heard a distinct click and a rough voice croak, “Your business?”  

He blinked and looked up into a dark tunnel – oh, no, it was the barrel of a truly unnecessarily big blaster.

Bodhi’s mouth dropped open, his brain scrambled wildly for something to say that would not result in his face turning to pulp in the next few seconds, and then a familiar voice said, “He is a member of our consulting team. Please lower your weapon.”

“Kay!” Bodhi said, a little loudly, as the blaster barrel vanished from his vision and his eyes could focus on…well, anything else. “Uh, hello,” he added a moment later, noticing the tiny woman behind the rifle.

“Hmm,” she grunted at him, already turning to face the doors behind him.

“I noted your beacon's signal and have informed Strax of your arrival,” Kay told him, looming overhead much the same way Grissom had done earlier, except this time it felt reassuring rather than terrifying.

“Right, good,” Bodhi said quickly, after a confused moment when he forgot who ‘Strax’ was supposed to be. “Let’s, uh, go meet him, then?”

Kay turned to lead him into the building, some kind of public space, it seemed, although the droid paused and turned his optics to the old woman. “Your body mass is significantly lower than the recommendation for that weapon, and your bone mass is fragile from age,” he informed her, sounding like one of those morbidly chipper user’s manuals for a holoscreen or a cheap chrono. “Should you fire it, it will likely knock you on your back, as well as break your humerus, clavicle, and ribs.”

The old woman eyed Kay calmly, chewing on a small strip of some kind of dried meat she pulled from her ragged coat. “Hmm,” she grunted again, and then turned dismissively back to the door.

“No one appreciates honest assessment around here,” Kay told Bodhi, leading him into a cold hallways and then through another set of thermal-guarded doors.

Bodhi hummed an absent agreement, taking in the distinctly civilian chaos of the Ground Commander’s HQ, so different from the military chaos of the hangar, and yet familiar in surprising ways. There was a caf table set up along one wall, he noted, and when he tilted his head back, he saw fake candles hanging from the rafters.

There was no intercom, and most of the people here seemed to be carrying on with their personal tasking devoid of the urgency of the hangar, but in the back corner where several bedsheets had been strung up, Bodhi could just make out dark silhouettes pacing back and forth.

“Cassian is in the command station,” Kay pointed to the bedsheets, “Although I do not know why they have bothered with such inefficient and insecure barriers.”

“It’s probably more a morale thing than a security thing,” Bodhi said absently, picking his way through beds and tables and people.

Kay made a faint whirring sound in his chassis that Bodhi interpreted as disdain. “Organic morale cannot be calculated with reasonably quantifiable variables.”

“No, I guess not,” Bodhi nodded, then pushed aside the bedsheet to enter the space. A blaster barrel flashed in front of his face, stopping a mere centimeter from his eye, and Bodhi froze. “Really?” he said with faint exasperation.

“This is Mike Yates,” Kay announced. “He is the pilot for Mister Eduardo Strax.”

The blaster wielder glowered at Bodhi over the edge of the weapon, their black headscarf accenting the dark glimmer of their eyes. “Lieutenant Elatar, let him pass,” a quiet female voice called, and Bodhi took a deep breath as the blaster fell away from his nose. “Over here, Mister Yates,” the same voice called, and Bodhi stepped carefully around the glowering lieutenant and slipped through the bedsheet to his right.

“Uh, Strax,” he said, swallowing back the impulsive need to call out Cassian’s real name. “It’s me.”

Cassian was hunched over a console a few steps away, glaring at the screen with an old scuffed headset held to one ear. A girl barely in her adolescence was tapping at the screen and frowning, her own headset slipping down over her head though she had tightened the headband as small as it would go. Around them, local rebels rushed from tables to consoles and back again, dodging around each other, muttering urgently and occasionally snatching up spare headsets to listen gravely. A Human woman with short green hair and a weary expression stood on the opposite side of the console, scanning through a datapad intently.

“The enemy appears to have engaged rebel forces,” Kay said helpfully from behind Bodhi. Lieutenant Elatar stood beside him, arms folded and head lowered like they were about to charge. “Simultaneous attacks were detected on the local rebellion’s communications network. They have scrambled to backup frequencies, and are attempting to pinpoint the location of the current fire fight.”

“And what about…” Bodhi paused as he realized he had forgotten Jyn’s code name. “Um, our teammate?”

Both Kay and Elatar turned to look at him, bright optics and dark eyes accessing. He resisted the urge to pull his jacket tighter against their attention. “No contact has been established with any rebel forces in the field after the initial distress call,” Kay said at last.

“We don’t know where the attack is even happening?” Bodhi felt his mouth drop open - how bad _were_ things here? Elatar's scowl deepened at his expression, clearly displeased with his incredulity. Had they not just put a blaster against his nose, he might have snapped at them, but, well, he was frustrated, not _stupid_.

“The X Wings will report when they pick up the enemy ships,” Elatar growled defensively, definitely put out at Bodhi’s tone. “Soon.”

Bodhi pressed his lips together and darted around a rebel with an armful of charts and a slightly panicked look on her face. He came up next to Cassian, watching his friend carefully. From a few steps away, Cassian looked intent but composed, his shoulders down and his face neutral. Up close, however, Bodhi could see the strain around his eyes and the way his lips were pressed tight, his breathing too carefully regulated to be completely natural.  “Strax,” Bodhi called again, shuffling closer. Cassian’s eye flicked to him for barely a second, then back to the console screen. He gave no other sign of having heard Bodhi. The pilot cleared his throat, glanced around at the tense command center, then asked. “Anything?”

Cassian’s fingers whitened on the round speaker of the headset he was holding against his ear.

“Got a comm from a sergeant,” the girl in the seat said abruptly. Cassian didn’t move, though his frown deepened. The green-haired woman, however, looked up from her datapad immediately.

“What is it, Frish?” She asked, and Bodhi recognized the voice that had called for him to enter.

The girl at the console frowned. “Wait - _ner ori’dush kar’ta –_ I lost it again. Word of TIE bombers shelling one of our lines, but I can’t get a kriffing clear signal.” She slammed a hand against the console side and swore again under her breath.

“Calm, Frish, calm,” the green-haired officer said soothingly. Despite her voice, however, Bodhi saw her face pale slightly and her hands clench around her datapad. Elatar sidled close to her side and stood with their hands behind their back and their elbow just pressing against the officer's arm.  The officer took a deep breath and nodded slightly before continuing. “Did you at least get which trenches?”

The girl grunted, frowning. Above her head, Cassian lowered the headphones, his eyes locked on the static of the console screen as if he could actually pick out useful intel from it. His face was somehow even more blank than a moment ago. He looked almost like one of those eerie moving manikins in wealthy store fronts, Bodhi thought with a small shiver. Lifelike, but not quite alive.

“Yeah, I got a general location, just by marking out the places that have gone dark,” the girl said, still fiddling with her console controls, though the motions seemed mostly futile.

 _Don’t say the east trenches,_ Bodhi begged silently. _Everywhere is terrible but please don’t say the east trenches._

“The worst of it seems to have been in the east trenches,” the girl said, oblivious to his mental pleading. “We lost all contact, nearby units report no movement and no life signs on the scans.”

The air in the command station suddenly seemed thick and choking, like someone had pressed a cloth over Bodhi’s face. Automatically, he reached up to scratch it off, but his hand went instead to his left temple, where the ugly scar that no one could see but that Bodhi could still _feel_ burned and burned as the ropey tentacles wrapped around his throat. The green-haired officer was speaking, but her voice was muffled by the thick air and the burning in his head. His Mum was singing, the slow, soft tune of the Bright Song, but she was muffled, too, and Bodhi couldn’t hear the words.

Cassian, manikin Cassian, was still standing exactly where he had been, watching the static on the console screen, his face careful and calm and not quite real. Bodhi stared at him, because Mum was gone and the glowing Temple of Kyber was gone and the colored lanterns were all dark forever because Jedha was _gone_ , and now Jyn was out there in the dark, too, and all Cassian did was stand around and look _calm?_

He felt the thick air swell in his throat, felt it bubbling into words that he wanted to spit like acid or poison or blood, but before he could open his mouth, Cassian raised a hand to his mouth. For some reason, his eyes lifted from the useless console screen to the officer and her lieutenant, still standing with their elbow pressed against the green-haired officer's arm. Cassian's face didn't change, but his fingers paled as he tightened them into a fist.

It took Bodhi a moment to notice the little black comm curled tightly in Cassian’s fingers. All the acid in Bodhi’s throat fizzled out, the poisonous words died unsaid.

“Vastra, this is Strax,” Cassian said into the comm, his face still eerily blank, his voice clipped and professional. “Vastra, please respond.”

Bodhi was aware that the local rebels were still conferring, leaning over the console, talking in low, urgent voices. He shuffled away from them, leaning towards Cassian, and the personal comm link that Cassian had built and Jyn had coded for security.

Nothing.

Slowly, Cassian took a step back from the console. “Vastra, this is Strax, please respond on emergency channels,” he said again, as unfeeling as the cold outside. Bodhi shifted his weight and resisted the urge to snatch the damn thing from Cassian’s hand and shout _Jyn! Are you out there?_

Cassian took another slow step back, and half turned away from the locals. Kay clumped around Bodhi, nudging him aside in a manner almost gentle for the big metal droid. He positioned himself between Cassian’s turned shoulder and the other rebels, and Bodhi heard a low hum from Kay’s upper chassis, the distinct sound of a transmission booster.

Cassian stretched out a hand without looking and rested it gratefully against Kay’s chest, leaning slightly as if trying to regain his balance, although his face and voice did not change. He clicked the comm again. “Vastra, this is Strax, please respond immediately with your status and location.”

Bodhi pressed up shamelessly against Kay’s side and craned his neck, listening hard. Cassian’s face stayed smooth and unruffled, but now he dropped his voice and said almost too softly to be heard, “Jyn, please.”

Nothing…nothing…then! A faint, hissing static, and the distant sound of thunder.

 _We are all of us lost together,_ Mum sang in Bodhi’s ear, _little lights shining on this dark night,_ and if the air had not been so chokingly thick in his throat, he might have hummed along.

Cassian’s calm broke.

He pressed the little transmitter against his forehead and turned his face towards the wall, but Bodhi saw his mouth twist, his eyes slam closed, his free hand reach up to dig shaky fingers into his scalp as he bent his head and hunched his shoulders. His knuckles were white, stark against his dark hair. He made no noise - even his breathing stopped, as if grief had driven all the air from his lungs.

Bodhi hoped that he and Kay were enough to block the view from anyone else in the space. No one here had the right to see this.

Then Cassian took a deep breath, his hand falling away from his hair. He straightened suddenly, and his face was calm again, but instead of the uncanny indifference of before, this was the calm of a man who had made a terrible choice, and would now follow it to the bitter end. It was the expression he had worn while adjusting the cuffs of his grey Imperial uniform, while Stormtrooper boots thudded heavily in the sand outside their stolen shuttle.

Bodhi had a terrible sinking feeling in his stomach.

“Based on your past actions in similar situations,” Kay said loudly from Bodhi’s side, making him jump. “You are about to do something that is tactically inadvisable.”

“Kay, help Commander Kelrune get her comms back up and running,” Cassian replied, stepping around them both and striding towards the nearby table.

Kay turned his head to regard Bodhi. “I estimate an eighty-nine percent chance that he is going to personally go looking for her.”

Cassian leaned over the charts on the table, clearly marking out a path through the (wrinkled, faded, probably not entirely up to date) markings. “Yates, coordinate with the air and ground commanders so that we can make an immediate medical evac if necessary.” He unsnapped his personal datapad from his belt and unfolded it, making a series of quick notes as he copied down his mapped route.

“I think the odds are higher than that, my friend,” Bodhi told Kay, watching Cassian’s fingers fly over the datapad screen.

Cassian didn’t look up at them. “Also get the local medics on standby, and see if you can’t help them prep for an influx of wounded,” he ordered, then clipped his datapad to his belt and strode for the door – or rather, the opening in the bedsheets.

“Hey!” Bodhi said sharply, knowing better than to call Cassian’s real name but not willing to use the fake one, not right now, not for this. Cassian paused, but his body language told Bodhi that he had seconds before the spy was out the door and into the night. “Take this,” Bodhi dug through his pockets a little wildly before he found where he had shoved Kay’s homing beacon. “I know you have the goggles and, and you _better_ have a light in your, you know, in your gear, but- ” he stammered before Cassian could speak. He grabbed his friend’s wrist and shoved the beacon into his unresisting hand. “Just take it. And come back. Both of you.”

Cassian’s other hand flashed up and he grabbed Bodhi’s wrist in a mirror grip. “Be ready,” he said quietly, with no promises in his voice, but no fear in his eyes as their gaze met.

“Right,” Bodhi nodded. “Right,” he muttered again as he watched Cassian vanish through the hanging sheets.

“I have marked this event in my database cataloging his behavior,” Kay said over Bodhi’s head. “My new calculations set the odds at ninety-six percent that he will continue to act in a tactically unsound manner when _she_ is in peril.”

“Higher than that, my friend,” Bodhi repeated with a sigh. “Higher than that.”

 

\--

 

Improbably, the city was burning.

The sharp winds had settled slightly since he was last out in it, but the storm was close enough yet that gusts of harsh wind still kicked up the icy snow and drove it into Cassian’s face. His NVGs fogged over almost immediately; he had to keep taking them off and tucking them up into his hood to melt away the thin film of obscuring ice. It seemed to him that if the clinging, wet snow or the unforgiving wind wasn’t enough to smother the burning buildings he could see in the east, then the oppressive weight of the otherwise unbroken darkness ought to do so, at least.

But the fires raged on, and while they provided some visibility in the frozen Veladine night, they also blocked the most direct route to the eastern trenches. Cassian set the fires off his left shoulder and headed south. He would have to loop down and around, working his way through the labyrinth of sunken streets and possibly panicked rebels to get to Jyn’s location. Her _possible_ location, that was - the coordinates she had been given in the brief. He had no idea if she was actually there, of course, because she hadn’t checked in with him at all, not even when she left the damn ship –

And whose fault was that?

Cassian yanked his fogged-over NVGs off his face and shoved them into his pocket.

 _You need sleep_ , she said, and she had been right, and he had hated it. He didn’t want sleep; how could he, when Bodhi kept singing his sad Festival songs and the op briefing for Veladine mentioned the local Festival traditions every fucking paragraph? How could he let his mind off the strict leash of work and war, when every time he did so, echoes of voices he only half remembered filled his ears?  The Alliance was made of a thousand disparate cultures, and yet right now it seemed like every one of them was chattering about their home planets’ Festival stories and expectations.

Every time Cassian thought of snow and candles and songs, his insides felt scooped out and hollow.

Worst of the inexplicable riot of unpleasant sensations that kept assaulting him was the sheer frustration of not understanding them. It had been decades since he was a boy on Fest, years since he had even really _thought_ about it. His family was long dead and buried and gone, and he hadn’t celebrated a Festival once since then. In fact, he was the go-to man for operations around this time of the standard calendar year, because he rarely became distracted by the…well, by any of it.

And yet this year he had found himself constantly fighting back memories of ice carvings and running through graveled streets with formless but beloved figures walking close behind and calling out to him. His dreams had been confused things of candles and scarves and familiar arms around his shoulders and an echoing emptiness in his chest. It made Cassian restless and uncertain, which made him irritable, which made him focus all the harder on things like recon missions, supply chains, and Imperial codes. Things he could understand. Things he could control.

Things he could afford to lose.

 _(Bed’s been a bit cold without you,_ Jyn said quietly, her fingers tracing over the side of her thigh where his leg had pressed against hers.)

 _Ah,_ he thought, slipping his NVGs back over his face in time to see the covered entrance to the dark season streets that he needed to access the rebel-controlled trenches. _There it is._

He staggered down the icy steps to the sunken street, and paused to get his bearings. A rebel unit should be hunkered down about a five minute walk… _that_ way. Down here, he was shielded from the wind, and the glow of the fires filtered in weakly through the narrow gaps between street walls and the aluminum covering. At least his goggles stopped freezing over, so he kept them on as he smacked the crusty snow from his shoulders and legs and slipped as quietly through the darkness as he could.

The silence of the empty street seemed to echo in his head, and the sudden realization of his own quiet fears hung in the stillness like a loose thread that he couldn’t stop picking at, unraveling all his dark thoughts from the last few days and stretching them out before his mind’s eye.

Kay had been around for years, someone he trusted, someone he cared about, but he was self-aware enough to know that part of his willingness to trust Kay was planted in the knowledge that the security droid was both generally unmoved by organic morality, and also very, very hard to kill. It was easier to let himself care about someone who was highly unlikely to vanish from his life, no matter how ugly or dangerous it became. But now there was also Bodhi, and Baze, and Chirrut. Now there was _Jyn_. And while they were all brave and tough and nobody’s victim, Cassian knew better than most how quickly circumstances could spin out of control, how easy it was to blink and realize the strongest people he knew were just…gone. Lost to the chaos and the cruelty of the universe.

He’d forgotten, for a little while, how precariously they all perched on the unstable reality of the galactic war. It was Scarif that had done that, he decided, coming to a major intersection and debating for a moment before turning southeast. After their improbable success and even more improbable survival on that beautiful, wretched, murdered planet, euphoria had blinded Cassian a little. He had been so damn _happy_ to wake up not only alive, but with Jyn’s hand tight in his own, that he had forgotten about the risks and simply allowed himself to fall cheerfully in love with her. With all of them, in a way.

He knew better. He had known better. Bad enough to have K2SO, even with Kay’s superior metal body and carefully maintained backup drives. Bad enough to have the thin connections he kept through the years with the other rebel soldiers and pilots who came in and out of his life like shooting stars, stationed around the galaxy or killed without warning in some distant battle. Cassian didn’t get to keep anyone he loved, so it was generally safer to just...not make it an issue. This was a lesson he had learned before, as a child on Fest, as a boy growing up among soldiers, as a spy in the darkest places of the universe. He knew better than to give himself things he could lose. He _knew_. And yet, here he was.

…in a trench on a dark planet, listening to the harsh breathing of frightened sentients just ahead. Cassian told himself to stop worrying about general threats and start thinking about specific, current threats.

“Who’s there?” a hoarse voice demanded as Cassian cautiously rounded the corner, and a dozen or so huddled figures turned blind faces towards him as he halted. None of them had goggles, but they were all dressed in the patchwork uniform of Veladine rebels, and they were all armed.

“Friend,” he replied calmly, holding his hands up although he knew they couldn’t see him. “To fight and oppose you and your forces, by any and all means at our disposal.”

“To…to refuse any law – Imperial law – contrary to the…rights of free beings,” one of them answered haltingly, then, “What’s your business?”

“Assessment. What’s your status?”

“Bad,” one of them said flatly.

“Down by half,” another answered with more tempered candor. “Three bodiless,” she added, this time with real pain in her voice.

“Bodiless?”

“We couldn’t recover anything for beads,” the first one snarled at him, as if this should be obvious. “They won’t be put on the Banner.”

“None of us will, if the fecking Imps snuff us all out,” a third muttered.

“ _Gaan'arir gar troan,”_ the candid one snapped, significantly less composed now.

“Someone give me your comm,” Cassian interrupted before morale could degrade even more. “I can patch you through to headquarters.”

It took him a few minutes, kneeling on the cold, slushy street while he squinted through his goggles at the unfamiliar comm device. Eventually, however, he got the transmitter properly sliced into the new secured frequencies, and listened for a moment to the palpable relief in the soldiers’ voices as they connected back to their fellow Veladine rebels.

“The nearest unit we know of is about half a click northeast,” the candid one told him, calm again with her hand wrapped tight around the comm. “Take this road for about five blocks, then turn right on Nindamos Street and left on Valmar Road. And thanks,” she called to his retreating back. “May the Force be with you.”

He didn’t respond. There was no time.

The next unit was exactly where he was told they would be. The unit after that was two blocks away from their projection position, crowded tightly together on the east side of the trench to glean some meager heat from a nearby burning building. The next unit was almost four blocks off from their expected coordinates. The unit after _them_ was lost – all he found was a broken strand of colored beads dangling from a broken stairwell. Cassian hesitated, then pocketed the strand. Would it make a difference to the local rebels, if the beads had no known owner? Would they still add them to their Banner?

The crackling ice that had formed on the beads melted in his pocket, making a small, wet spot against his hip that somehow was even colder than the rest of him. Cassian found himself walking closer to the east side of the trenches, as if he also hoped to catch some small stray heat from the smoldering buildings outside. But the snow and the dark was finally beginning to win out over the roaring fires, leaving only burned out husks and the faint memories of warmth behind.

The rebels were clearly scattered around the area, driven from their expected coordinates by the shelling, but Jyn’s contact unit should have been somewhere near to his current location. He pressed doggedly a little further east, towards the last known enemy lines, and kept one hand on his blaster, because there was no way to know exactly which territory belonged to which side right now. The next group of soldiers he stumbled on in the darkness might be wearing the white armor of the stormtroopers.

There was a body face-down in the trench a few steps further on. It was too large to be Jyn, but Cassian found himself holding his breath until he rolled it over to reveal a large green Mirialin, his eyes open but unseeing. Cassian pushed them shut and folded the man’s hands over his chest, then did a quick sweep of the dead rebel’s wrists and neck. Sure enough, he found another thin bracelet with a large blue bead and a smaller pink one, which he slipped off and put in his pocket with the necklace. At least he could tell the headquarters where this one had come from, if he made it back.

 _When_ , he reminded himself. Words had power, he had learned that long ago. _When I make it back_ , he thought stubbornly, and then, _when we make it back._ Cassian Andor did not believe that the universe was an inherently just or fair place, but he did believe that people had the chance to make it that way, if only they were willing to fight for it, willing to do what needed to be done. And words had power. So he worked his way through cold, dark trenches while the bombed-out buildings crumbled and burned around him, and said the words over and over in his head, willing them to be true, needing them to be true.

He wasn’t going to lose her like this. Frozen darkness and Imperial bombs and unfair, uncaring universe be damned, _he was not going to lose her like this_.

Part of the aluminum ceiling had caved in ahead of him, dumping a large pile of snow that blocked most of the trench off. It left a narrow opening against the wall that he could just squeeze through, but no promise that the rest of the street wouldn’t be impassible beyond it. Cassian considered turning around and finding yet another detour through the streets, but that would leave a large section of the area unexplored. Jyn could easily be down these streets. So he checked again that his snow trousers were secured tightly around the tops of his boots, put his back to the wall, and edged through the gap.

The snow drift came up his shins, then over his knees. Sliding sideways became a clumsy, blundering movement, but he grit his teeth and forced his way through even as the bitingly cold snow crept up his thighs. If it got any higher, he thought a little irritably, this was going to get truly painful. His foot caught on something hidden under the snow and he stumbled, cursing under his breath as his goggles slipped to hang crookedly on his face. He clawed them down around his neck and regained his balance, grimacing as he forced his way onward. To his immense relief, the snow drift began to drop away before it reached all the way up his legs, the wall of snow in front of him began to curve further out, and finally, he broke through to the other side.

He stamped his feet for a moment to knock the clinging snow off his legs, and then the hair on the back of his neck rose. Cassian paused, listening, but the soft rustle he thought he’d heard did not repeat. Still, he waited, trying to hear over the sound of his own slightly labored breathing.

There is was again, closer.

Then the hard strike of rapid footsteps, barreling straight for him.

Cassian jerked back, but there was nowhere to go but back into a wall of snow. He fumbled for his NVGs with one hand and his blaster with the other, but his thick gloved fingers had barely closed around the hilt when the attacker slammed into him. Cassian flung his arms up and grabbed blindly at the attacker, trying to use their momentum against them and fling them away. Too late, they already had a hand latched onto his collar and another hooked under his arm, and Cassian slammed half on the street and half on the snow drift with a muffled grunt of pain. The wind drove out of his lungs and something hard dug into his belly, sending a spike of sharp pain through his torso. The attacker pinned him faster than he could process it, their knee on his gut and their face just close enough to feel their breath but too far to slam his head up and catch them in the nose. If they had a nose – they were humanoid, but in the total dark, he could tell little else. A few meters away, he heard more footsteps, more people shuffling carefully through the dark towards Cassian and his attacker.

The hand around his arm pulled away, but he felt the chilled edge of a blade press against his pulse instead. He couldn’t even open his mouth without risk of jostling that blade and slicing his throat wide open. A faint green glow flared to life above him, the reflection of night vision goggles against the attacker’s face.

Abruptly, the blade vanished from his neck. Cassian didn’t wait for their next move; he threw himself to the side, twisting his hips the way Jyn had shown him and flipping the attacker on their back. He jerked one arm up and shoved his forearm hard against their neck, not applying enough pressure to choke them, but certainly enough to be threatening.

The attacker lay still, their – _her_ – hands settling lightly on his sides. Cassian blinked, surprised by the sudden lack of aggression. Hurriedly, tensed for another attack, he reached up and yanked his own goggles back over his face, flicking them on and looking down at –

“Jyn,” he breathed, and snatched his forearm off her neck.

“Nice reversal,” she murmured, laying still against the snow.

“So?” A woman’s voice called from a meter or so behind. “Shoot or don’t shoot?”

“Don’t shoot,” Jyn raised her voice just enough to carry, but she didn’t make any attempt to move out from under him. “He’s with me.”

A pause, then the woman said dryly, “Right. We’ll return to position.” The feet shuffled away, a susurration of voices whispering complaints about the dark following after the confident strides of the speaker.

“She’s the only one whose goggles still work,” Jyn told him quietly. “The rest have to latch on to her to get anywhere.” Her hands were still pressed flat against his ribs, her breathing light and quick. Her knife was in the snow next to his hand, he realized, dropped there when he rolled her, probably to avoid accidentally stabbing him if he tried to kill her.

A dozen of the most vicious curses he had ever learned raced through his mind, then he shoved them away. With brisk, professional movements, he reached up and stripped her NVGs off, tucking them into the pouch on her side. Jyn lay still, her eyes half closed in the dark as she peered blindly up at him. Cassian sat back to his knees, pulling her up out of the snow, then he stripped off his own goggles and clipped them back into the strap on his belt.

Jyn’s hand brushed tentatively against his knee, feeling her way to him. “Are you alright?” She asked softly as he secured the straps with slightly clumsy fingers. “I didn’t mean to hit you so - ”

Cassian rose up on his knees and wrapped his arms hard around her waist, pressing one hand to the space between her shoulder blades and drawing her as tight against him as he could. She smelled of snow and burnt cloth, with just the faintest copper tang of Human blood. Her hair was damp against his cheek and their thick winter gear was covered in cold slush. When she turned her head towards his neck, her icy nose and lips pressed against the hollow of his throat inside his hood.

But he could feel her breath against his skin, and she was solid and alive in his arms, so Cassian settled her more firmly against his chest and tightened his grip.

Jyn slid her arms around his shoulders, shifting slightly so her body fit better against his. It was Scarif, he thought numbly, the beach again, both of them blind and clinging together, but this time his conviction that they were dead was replaced with the sudden fierce understanding that they were _alive_. As if to confirm it, Jyn sighed - a small, gentle release of breath that he felt more than heard, a rush of heat over his cold skin, a proof of life.

They knelt together in silence for a long moment, and it was the closest to warm that Cassian had really felt in days.

 _I’m sorry,_ he thought, pressing his lips against her ear and willing himself to say it. _I’m so sorry, I don’t really know what’s wrong with me but I think I am afraid. Please forgive me this, forgive my uncertainty, it is not your fault, it’s only memories, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know I deserved it, but don’t leave me like that again._

But all he could force out was a breathless, “You’re alive.”

“Yeah,” she whispered back, and then, because she somehow understood him despite all his instinctive, careful barriers, she pressed her chapped lips to his pulse and murmured, “I’m still with you.”

 -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many of the background character names in this chapter are derived from people I follow on tumblr (especially the pilots), but some are references to popular media such as Doctor Who, Harry Potter, and of course, Moby Dick. (The street names are all references to Middle Earth.) 
> 
> [Death Beads](http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/25/death-beads-south-koreas-new-way-to-honor-the-deceased/) are a way that South Koreans have found to deal with their dead in the face of relatively little real estate. I haven’t copied the tradition exactly, but I do like the idea of keeping a piece of your loved ones near, while sending the rest to be part of the communal tapestry of your history.
> 
> I’ve taken a few creative liberties with how real Night Vision Goggles work (although only tiny details), because I like to think a civilization that has figured out lightspeed has probably also figured out the problems with NVGs. Also, I’ve made these goggles significantly smaller and lighter than our real-world bricks. As a side note, if you ever have a chance to go somewhere with minimal light pollution (I suggest the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but I recognize that is not an easy destination) and [look up at the night sky with NVGs](http://aunv.blackice.com.au/userfiles/david-Southern_Cross_1280.jpg) of any kind – _do it._ )
> 
> I feel like I should explain to anyone not familiar with my other fic: I headcanon that Mandolorian culture considers a loss of bodily control to be a curse, so cuss words and insults tend along the lines of "may your organs turn against you" or "you can't control your mouth," etc. That's why things like "undisciplined" are considered rude words. (Makes the Clones and Order 66 that much more tragic).
> 
> So I’ve tried to incorporate aspects of traditions into Veladinian (and Jedhan, Festian, and other mentioned cultures) from various religions around this holiday season, and I hope none of them are coming across as crass or disrespectful. Please let me know if they are.
> 
> Cassian's POV remains, as ever, really friggin' hard to write.


	3. But Always The Light In Your Eyes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At last, we reach the actual prompt.

“Twenty-five fighters left,” Jyn told him quietly, her shoulder pressed lightly against his as they stood near the wall in the trench with the other rebels. “Six critically wounded. Lots of bodies, but they are willing to leave them if we mark the location. Medical supplies and ammunition low, but plenty of working weapons. With you here, two and a half working NVGs.” She nodded to the tall Iktotchi who wore one pair of goggles carefully adjusted around her large white horns, and then Jyn gestured to her own face. “My battery was damaged. I can use them, but they tend to switch off after about five minutes and it resets the focus every time I switch it back on.”

That explained why she had attacked without looking at him first; the time it might have taken her to adjust the lenses of the goggles could have given a hostile all the opening they needed. Cassian scanned through the huddled rebels, marking wounded bodies and grim faces. Only thirteen of them looked completely unharmed, and the six critically injured had been laid close to one another along one wall, with what appeared to be every scarf and jacket the healthier rebels could afford to give them piled on top.

He leaned slightly harder against Jyn’s shoulder, for both warmth and reassurance. “Captain Tanoor?”

“Injured when I got here,” she said bluntly, “dead in the shelling. Sergeant Cari is in command.”

Cassian had a pretty good inkling of the answer, but he had to ask anyway. “Evac to HQ?”

Knowing that he could see even though she could not, Jyn held up two fingers in the dark. “Can’t go on the surface without risking enemy fire,” she folded down one finger, “and no one here is completely sure they could find the way back through the trenches in time for it to matter.” She dropped her hand and folded her arms around her waist, somehow managing to look fierce and fearless even as she huddled for warmth.

Cassian wanted to wrap his arms around her shoulders and hold her again, but refrained. It was one thing to have a weakness, another to advertise it.

“I might have a solution.” He pulled Kay’s locator beacon from his pack and grabbed Jyn’s hand, setting it into her fingers (and if he lingered slightly with his hand around her wrist, it was safe enough, because Sergeant Cari had her back turned to them for the moment). “The signal is weak out here, but it should get stronger as it gets closer.”

“Still have to get through the trenches.”

“It will be slow going,” he agreed. “And we have to leave a few behind to hold this line.”

Jyn turned her head to him, her eyes only a pale gleam even with his goggles’ help. “Not much they could do if the ‘troopers press in.”

“But they’re not likely to press if someone is firing at them, even just a few shots,” he countered lightly. “When their numbers are this low, they prefer artillery fire and air strikes to confrontation.”

Jyn abruptly pushed off from the wall, moving towards the row of critically wounded. Cassian hesitated a moment, but Jyn stretched a hand out to the side carefully, and he gladly stepped forward to grab it and guide her through the trench. He stopped her just before they stepped on the first prone body, and Jyn dropped to one knee, letting go of his hand but leaning a little against his leg to keep contact (warmth, Cassian thought, and reassurance). “Rahn,” she said quietly, groping a little in the dark until her hand found the body’s arm. “Rahn, you still hanging tough?”

“Y’s,” a small voice croaked, and Cassian shifted to see the face a bit better. His stomach sank as he caught sight of the very faint scruff on the slightly rounded jaw. The youth’s breathing was raw and painful, and his eyes drifted closed immediately.

Jyn couldn’t see his eyes, but she must have heard some change in Rahn’s breathing because she said sternly, “How long since I last woke you?”

Without missing a beat, the boy said, “Two h’rs ‘n…n’ five min…minutes.” His voice cracked from youth as much as fatigue and pain as he said, “wh’re’s m’ beads?”

“Here,” Jyn picked up his shaking hand and set it against his neck. “Still here.”

“Gotta put ‘em on th’ Banner,” the boy mumbled. “Gotta put ‘em on…f’r the Festival,” Jyn rubbed his boney hands between her palms and he continued with a little more clarity. “’S the lights, Vastra, gotta…the lights ‘n the beads.”

“Yeah,” Jyn said flatly, setting his hand down and resting hers on top of it for a moment. “We’ve got a plan for that, Rahn.” She turned her face up to Cassian, and he dropped quickly down beside her. To his mild surprise, Jyn twitched away from him as he knelt, carefully putting a few centimeters’ worth of distance between them. Cassian glanced at her sidelong, but her eyes were focused on the wounded’s general position and her jaw was set. Cassian pushed away the uneasy feeling in his gut and turned to the boy, who turned his head in a vague approximation of Cassian’s direction.

“Hello, Rahn,” Cassian said carefully, reaching out and putting his hand against the boy’s thin chest. Cassian couldn’t feel a pulse through his thick gloves or the boy’s coat, but his ribs jerked up and down irregularly, his breath thin and reedy. The smell of blood and vomit was strong in the air near the wounded, but both Cassian and Jyn ignored it. “I’m Strax. We’re going to get you home.”

“Home,” the boy repeated, and then fell silent.

Cassian turned his head to Jyn and dropped his voice, although it probably wasn’t necessary. “I’ll talk to the sergeant about the beacon. Stay or come?”

“I’ll talk to her. You stay,” Jyn replied in a terse voice.  She kept her face down, not turning toward him at all. The unease in Cassian’s gut sprouted another tendril, and he wanted to reach out and brush the lock of tangled hair that swung down against Jyn’s cheek, partially blocking her face from him. But the distance between them suddenly felt cavernous, and he kept his hands to himself. “You can talk,” Jyn said, in the same clipped tone, gesturing to the prone boy.

“Alright,” he agreed quietly, then took Jyn’s hand. He peeled the goggles off his face and shoved them under her palm until he felt Jyn pluck them from his hand. He listened as she pulled them over her own eyes, and blinked a few times until his eyes adjusted enough to the pitch black that he could pick up the faint green glow of NVG light reflecting on her face. Jyn’s hand on his shoulder tugged him to the side, and he shuffled until he was sitting against the wall, the shivering boy’s shoulder pressed against his thigh.

Jyn pulled away, but even blind, Cassian had pretty decent reflexes. He caught her wrist before she could withdraw entirely, and slowly turned his head to press his cheek against the thin strip of skin between her glove and her rough sleeve (she really needed a better jacket; he added it to his mental list of things to do as soon as they were back on Home One). He could see nothing, but he felt the muscles in her forearm twitch slightly. “I’ll be here,” he promised quietly.

Jyn’s fingers curled slightly against his hair, then she pulled firmly away and he listened to her light steps pacing away into the darkness. Cassian pulled his hood back up, trying not to read too much into it. He had hurt her, he knew, but it didn’t feel like she was holding a grudge. There was no antagonism towards him, no attempt to punish him or remind him that he had been a fool.

Perhaps it was simply that he had triggered her own defense mechanisms, Cassian thought a bit bitterly; he had made her feel like she couldn’t trust him, like he wasn’t safe because any moment he might slip into a bad mood and freeze her out.

The thought made him a little sick.

Next to him, one of the wounded on the other side of the boy moaned, shifting weakly in the dark. The boy jerked in response to the sudden noise, his breathing harsh with surprise, and instinctively, Cassian reached down and pressed his palm against the boy’s shoulder.

“Are you,” the boy’s voice was still hoarse and so damnably young, “still there?”

“Yes,” Cassian replied.

“M’ beads?”

Cassian groped blindly for his hand and then gingerly fumbled for Rahn’s neck. Fortunately, they were only a few centimeters apart, and Cassian felt the boy’s bony fingers latch on to the strand of beads quickly enough. _You can talk_ , Jyn had said, and he understood what she meant – Jyn was a lot of things, “comforting” was not one of them. But Rahn clearly meant something to her, another crying child in a firefight, another droid facing down a blaster, so she wanted to help him. And however else she felt about Cassian right now, she at least trusted him enough to do this for her. So Cassian leaned his head back against the cold durastone wall and let his hand settle on Rahn’s shoulder again. “I’ve heard about the Banner,” he said slowly, searching for something that would keep the boy’s mind engaged without reminding him of his situation. “It’s a nice tradition.”

“Fam’ly,” the boy muttered, “on th’ Banner.”

 _Ah._ Cassian sighed, then squeezed Rahn’s shoulder gently. “I’m sorry to hear that. Mine’s gone, too.”

“’m not,” Rahn went on, a note of fear creeping into his faltering voice, “No one’s…no one put me on…got no one,” he strained suddenly, like he was trying to sit up, but Cassian pressed down slightly and he collapsed back. “Put me on…th’ Banner,” the boy whimpered.

“You don’t need to worry about that,” Cassian said firmly, the lie rolling as easily off his tongue as the thousand others he’d said before. It wasn’t truth that soldiers needed, anyway, not at times like these. “You’re not going to die, Rahn.”

“My beads,” the boy insisted, “put my… m’ beads…on th’ Banner. Pl’s,” he begged, clutching at Cassian’s fingers clumsily. “Please.”

“Of course,” Cassian soothed, “Of course, but, Rahn, breathe now, alright? Breathe. Breathe.” He took several long, slow breaths, willing the boy to copy him, to calm down. It only partially worked; the boy subsided but his breathing stayed mostly erratic. Nearby, Cassian picked up the muffled sound of Jyn’s voice talking earnestly to someone, probably the sergeant. He strained to hear her, not to know what was going on but just to know what she was saying, how she was saying it, listening for pain or distress or anger. But she stopped too quickly and the sergeant responded in a deep, low voice that he couldn’t hope to pick apart over the noise of the wounded between them.

At his side, and the boy murmured something Cassian only barely caught. “No, my homeworld didn’t have a Banner,” Cassian answered his slurred question. “But we celebrated Light Night around this time, too. We had…” he trailed off, uncertain why he was going down this particular road. He didn’t do this, didn’t dwell on the meager fragments of memory left over from his peaceful life as a small child (a peace which had been a lie, in a way, because as far as Cassian could ever tell, there had been war simmering under the surface for years and years before the Republic finally collapsed under its own weight). It was better to forget, better to stay focused on his work so that other children would never have to fight away memories of blood on snow or shattered homes…

But the boy’s cold fingers suddenly touched the back of Cassian’s hand and he slurred, “tell me?” like a child asking for a story, so Cassian swallowed and tried to remember what pieces he could.

“The ice sculptures were my favorite,” he recalled, closing his eyes against the dark and trying to picture them. “There was a space, a park, I think, just outside of town, and people would carve elaborate things out of the ice and snow. Statues of famous people, or animals, or scenes from folk tales. Someone made a small city once, buildings the size of a grown Human, but detailed as if they were real.” Under his hand, Rahn’s breathing seemed to even out a little, and Cassian paused to work off one glove and feel for the boy’s pulse. Weak, but stable.

“When the carvings were done,” he continued in a low, soothing voice, “they would fill them with lights. Sometimes the lights would be colored, but I remember…gold,” he nodded into the darkness, caught up now in the memory. “Most of the sculptures would be filled with golden light, and it would make everything, the people, the sky, even the ice…it would all look warm. Like there was a fire burning inside them.”

“Your…fam’ly,” the boy asked so softly Cassian almost couldn’t hear him over even the quiet sounds of the other rebels around them, soft as the snowfall when the wind died away. “You…with…fam’ly?”

“I did,” he forced himself to reply, pushing away the instinctive desire to ignore the question or change the subject. “I was young, but I remember my parents explaining some of the sculptures to me. I can’t remember what they said,” he confessed, startling himself a little but not enough to stop. “But I remember that they both held my hands, and that we were happy.”

“’s nice,” Rahn mumbled.

Cassian smiled faintly. “It was.” _And_ _I’d almost forgotten it_ , he thought. _I worked so hard to avoid the ugly memories that I lost the good ones, too. It was easier to just…put it all away._ He thought, suddenly, of Bodhi’s singing in the cockpit. He thought of Jyn’s open, determined expression as she - a woman who had lost her home twice over - asked how they could help their friend cope with the loss of his.

They were, both of them, always so much braver than he had ever been.

“Mm,” Rahn murmured suddenly. “Like this one.”

Cassian’s eyes snapped open, though it did him no good at all, because what he had thought was just his memory of Bodhi’s soft singing was, in fact, the sound of someone nearby actually singing. The voice was far away and the words muffled, but the tune was distinct and easy to pick out. Cassian identified it a moment later as a popular Festival song in this quadrant, a touch melancholy but easy to learn and easier still to sing along.

It took him a moment longer than it should have to notice that Rahn was doing exactly that.

His breathing was still reedy and uneven, and the tune was a little off-key. All the same, he drew in a shaky breath and kept singing, the familiar words slurred but recognizable.

Cassian was about to hush him when he felt the brush of someone’s presence just in front of his folded legs, and then a feather-light touch of fingers on his bent knee. He reached out blindly, and Jyn found his hand in the dark. The green glow of her goggles bobbed in front of him as she looked from him to the singing boy.

And then another voice joined in, a high-pitched but sweetly-tuned male voice that seemed to bolster the weak notes from Rahn’s throat.

And then another.

Something flickered in the corner of Cassian’s eye. He turned his head sharply, and then pressed his eyes tightly shut and then forced them open as wide as he could. No, it was still there, not a figment of his imagination, but the definite distant glow of a small, golden light.

“There,” he whispered, tightening his grip on her hand. “Do you see - ?”

“Yes,” she replied instantly. “Someone in the next trench over, just past the rubble.”

Another voice in their own trench suddenly took up the simple tune.

Another light flickered through the narrow gaps of the trench wall and the aluminum covering.

It must be the other units that he had passed, Cassian decided, but he couldn’t quite reconcile his mental map with the direction of the lights, or the strength of the nearby singing. For it was growing stronger, more people than he remembered passing were suddenly joining in the chorus of the Festival song, not just in their trench but outside, across the smoldering rubble.

Beside him, he heard the tiny click of Jyn’s goggles switching off. She tugged lightly on his hand, and in the dim but growing light, he could see the barest outline of her profile.

“Sergeant,” she said in a quiet voice that still cut through the singing. Nearby, he saw the gleam of ivory horns turning towards them. “Light your emergency lantern,” Jyn ordered.

“Wait,” Cassian said warningly, because they did not know for sure who might see, but Jyn’s hand tightened around his and he thought she turned her face back towards him.

“If we don’t turn on the light,” she said in a low, practical tone at odds with how her hand clutched at his. “Then we’ll never know.”

Almost all of the soldiers in their trench were singing now, still soft, but the people in the next trench over surely heard them. They were loud, themselves, at least two dozen strong by Cassian’s estimate. The song, nearing it’s end now, only a few lines to go, soared out over the snow and the burned out building between them. Behind Jyn, Sergeant Cari suddenly flipped on her little lantern, which was only a hand-sized storm light, but after the impenetrable darkness, it flared like a tiny sun. Half the trench flinched at the sudden glare, Cassian among them, though Jyn merely narrowed her eyes.

She also, Cassian noted with the sick feeling back in his gut, pulled her hand from his and rose to her feet.

The walls of this sunken street were much lower than the ones he had passed through, the street angled slightly upwards towards an exit to the surface. So it was possible for most of the rebels, even Jyn, to stand up and peer through the gaps under the aluminum roof. Jyn, though, had to push herself up on her toes and balance her hands against the edge to see properly, and Cassian would have thought it just a little bit cute (he would never, ever admit that to her) except the moment she peered out, her shoulders went tight and still. The soldier who stood up next to her to look abruptly stopped singing.

Cassian scrambled to his feet and shoved between Jyn and the other soldier, squinting out at the nearby light.

And straight into the black, empty eyes of a stormtrooper helmet.

The singing on both sides died.

There were roughly a dozen that he could see, and oddly, only one was still wearing his helmet. The others, all Human males with their hair buzzed down to the scalp and the distinct brand of their individual serial code on the left sides of their heads, stood ranged on either side of him, staring back at them with worryingly blank expressions.

The bombs, Cassian recalled, had forced _everyone_ to relocate.

Cassian’s hand crept slowly to his blaster hilt, below the stone where the ‘troopers couldn’t see (but surely knew) what he was doing. _The helmeted one first, the angle was clearest, but then sweep right, take out as many as possible before hitting the deck_. Next to him, Jyn’s hand moved just as slow and deliberate to her own blaster. She would sweep left, he knew. The soldier on Cassian’s other side was a wild card, but would at least provide some cover fire while Cassian took out –

A high thin voice, breathless with pain and delirium, sung out into the tense silence, and Cassian’s heart stuttered in his chest. Beside him, Jyn was as still as the ice sculptures of his childhood memories.

Behind them, Rahn was singing again.

It was a slightly different song, a little faster, a little sweeter, but just as catchy and easy to hum along with as the first.

Across the smoldering rubble of the building that had once stood between these two streets, one of the helmet-less stormtroopers opened his mouth. His voice was halting and off-key, and he frowned as he fumbled a few of the words, but somehow, despite everything, he was singing too.

A low, rich voice suddenly joined in, carrying the tune, and Cassian could actually see the stormtrooper relax slightly as he followed the new voice. To Cassian’s left, Sergeant Cari was leaning against the wall with her eyes half-closed, singing as loudly and confidently as if she were at a party surrounded by friends, or on stage at a night club, not in a bombed-out city surrounded by Imperials.

This couldn’t be possible, any moment now the other 'troopers would raise their rifles and kill first their own traitor and then the rebels that they could see so clearly across the terrifyingly short distance.

They didn’t.

They sang.

At his side, Jyn dropped her hand and stared, her face neutral but her eyes intent. Cassian knew he looked just as blank to anyone who did not know him, and just as stunned to Jyn.

They were all singing now, and the helmeted ‘trooper reached up and pulled off the white skull-mask to reveal…well, another pale, generic Human male, Cassian thought, another buzzcut and serial tattoo, another person the Empire had turned into a numbered tool. But as he lowered the helmet out of sight below the wall and opened his mouth to sing, his eyes darting a little uncertainly around, he became a person again.

They were all singing, the rebels to the east and the Imperials to the west, and then…more voices, from the south, and the rebel next to Cassian pointed excitedly at the sudden glow of another lantern flaring up, and more rebel fighters peering around the tops of trenches.

Then another, to the north.

 _We will have to shuffle every unit, after this_ , Cassian thought distantly. _They will know where every one of them is. The next bombing run will wipe them all out_.

Another light to the northwest, but this time it was shaved heads and uncertain expressions that looked out, and the singing wavered for a moment before one of the new ‘troopers haltingly joined in. _We will know theirs, too_ , he thought, and then, _this cannot be real. I have finally lost my mind._

Jyn’s hand slid into his, and Cassian gripped it tightly, unbalanced and afraid and just a little bit relieved that she was not so cold to him yet. She must have picked up on his fear, because she stepped a little closer and used his hand to tug him down slightly, so she could speak in an undertone directly in his ear.

“Bodies,” she whispered.

Cassian blinked.

“If we can get them to stop firing,” Jyn explained, nudging him with her shoulder. “It matters to these people, their beads and their Banner,” she shook her head as if to clear it, and then whispered, “We can get the bodies.” She jerked her chin out to the snow, and in the flickering light of the lanterns and flashlights from all the nearby trenches, Cassian could make out a handful of still, dark forms among the rubble. Some of them were in white armor. Most were not.

Jyn’s voice wavered slightly as she spoke again, though he could tell she was trying to hide it. “Can you talk to them?”

 _Not without violating about twelve protocols, three direct orders, and my sense of self-preservation_.

Cassian looked down at Jyn, and as he watched, her mouth set into a firm line. She would go out there anyway, he saw it in the glint of the lantern light reflected in her eyes. Truce or no truce. A boy was dying with beads in his hand, and the people huddled around them clung to their bracelets and necklaces, and Jyn would walk through blaster fire to bring their dead home.

Cassian took a deep breath, and brought Jyn’s hand up between his body and the wall, taking care not to let anyone – not in the trench and definitely not outside of it – see how he pressed the back of her hand against his stomach.

“I can.”

 

\--

 

The Imperials were singing again. Well, almost everyone out here in this wasteland of rubble and snow and darkness seemed to be singing right now, but this time around, the Imps started the song. This one was about giving excessive gifts to your true love, and it grated on Jyn’s nerves but it was catchy and repetitive, so it would probably last awhile. And while they were singing, they weren’t shooting.

Which meant she and Cassian had time to work.

Cassian knelt next to Sergeant Cari, taking apart her backup communicator and reassembling it into a short-range frequency scaler. Once he found the local Imp frequencies, they could slice the encryption and get a message across. It was risky – if the Imps decided to turn on them, they could easily backtrace the jerry-rigged comm and get some exact coordinates on their position, the kind of perfect coordinates that bombers loved. It also probably broke a bunch of rules and was, in general, kind of a dumb thing to do. Saw would have shot her for trying it. Or at least, bellowed at her for sheer idiocy and possible treason. She had the vague feeling that Draven’s views on the matter wouldn’t be much more charitable. Deliberate communication with the enemy? Potentially giving away not only your location but also your obvious ability to hack their encryption? Sheer lunacy.

And yet, Cassian was kneeling on the cold pavement in the poor light of the emergency lantern, stripping wires and breaking down comm components with his steady, capable hands. She could see from the hard line of his jaw and the glare he shot the lantern once when it sputtered that he really did not like this, but he was doing it, because she asked it of him. And he kept glancing over at where she crouched near the wounded, like he was checking to make sure she was still there. And before, in the dark, when he’d pulled her in and held her so tight that her breath caught...

 _But then,_ _I’d like us to be focused on the mission,_ _and he barely spoke to her after that hug in the collapsed trench, barely looked at her once the lights came on, every word had been short and to the point between them._ _Professionals_ _, he had said._

Shit. He kept sending her the most confusing fucking messages.

So Jyn held Rahn’s cold hand instead, putting his fingers around his beads when he asked, listening to his delirious chatter about songs and lights and the Banner, and she tried not to think about it. If he wanted professional, well, Jyn could do professional. If he wanted distance, well, she was a fucking expert on _that_. "How long until I last woke you up?" She asked the boy softly.

"Sev'nt'n minutes," he warbled unsteadily, and Jyn squeezed his hand approvingly and let him go back to off-key humming and the occasional incoherent attempt to sing the words of the ambient music.

The comm in Cassian's ungloved hands crackled suddenly, and her partner frowned and flexed the reddening fingers on one hand before he started twisting at the wires again. He would have to get his gloves back on soon, or he would risk frostbite. In the unsteady light and from several steps away, Jyn couldn’t pick out any signs of deadening tissue on his hands, but in these temperatures, it wouldn’t take long. Under her own hand, Rahn stopped singing and turned his head toward her, mumbling something about rainbows. _No, not rainbows, colors_ \- he was wondering aloud what color his beads would be when he died.

“No,” Jyn said sharply, under the sound of the singing. “Stop that.” She prodded his shoulder gently with one hand. “You know this song?” The gift-giving song was still going on, an endless list of all the ridiculous gifts this wealthy (probably Imperial) git was giving his true love, but the boy smiled blurrily and returned to humming along. It was breathy and unsettling, but _shit_ , it was better than speculation about his death rituals.

Jyn glanced across the trench again, in time to see Cassian set the comm on the ground and fumble his gloves back on, rubbing his palms together vigorously. Maybe he thought they had just grown too familiar, or she’d been too embarrassingly open toward him. It had only been about seven months since Scarif, and the whatever-it-was between them had grown so quietly and quickly that Jyn had hardly been able to catalog it. It had terrified and exhilarated her, and she might have panicked over it if everyone else hadn’t been so completely unsurprised. Chirrut had squeezed her hand and told her to trust her heart, Baze had shrugged and called it a “natural partnership,” and Cassian himself had given her a sideways, slightly embarrassed smile and they had moved the conversation back to safer ground. And even when she had slipped into his bed and changed the nature of the relationship, they still hadn’t needed to give it a name.

Or she thought they hadn’t.

It was funny - Jyn had never, ever been the sort of person to assume that fucking someone meant that there was anything between you but fucking. And yet, it seemed that somehow she apparently had done exactly that.

And Cassian hadn’t.

That was fine. They were adults, soldiers, spies. She could be calm about it. She could be kriffing _professional_. If he stood too close, it was only because she was a good person to have close at hand in the event of a sudden firefight. If he went out of his way to give her equipment or clothes, she knew that he hated his team to be underprepared. If he hugged her like he had out near the cave-in, she could take it for what it was – relief that he hadn’t lost a teammate. Relief that his friend and bedmate was still alive.

“ _Fiiiive prot’col droids_ ,” Rahn wheezed next to her, slightly out of sync with all the other rebels.

This singing couldn’t last much longer. How many Light Night songs were there, anyway? Common ones, anyway, songs that both sides could or would sing together? They had been at it for almost thirty minutes, and the nape of Jyn’s neck grew tighter and tighter as it went on, almost certain that any moment now she would hear the dull drone of bombers thundering overhead to punish them all for daring to pretend at peace.

Cassian yanked off his glove again, his hands still red but moving as steadily as ever. The comm hissed and crackled in his hands again, and then the static seemed to steady out, a regular pulsing noise indicating a successful freq sweep. Cassian started to tap at the small screen, but his hands were now clumsy with cold and his frown deepened as he fumbled with the coding.

Jyn leaned down over Rahn, put one finger under his chin and tilted his face to look at her. “Hey,” she said softly. “How long since I woke you up?”

“Six mins," the kid mumbled, then, "beads." Jyn placed his hand back on the beads at his neck again.

“Hear the song?” she whispered, waiting until Rahn's mouth jerked in an exhausted parody of a smile and he started to hum low and off key again. She rose, and stalked to Cassian’s shoulder.

Up close, she could see that his hands were turning white at the fingertips, a very bad sign, but he gamely kept trying to tap the screen, growling under his breath as he missed a button and hit the edge of the comm instead. Jyn suppressed the impulse to grab his hands and bring them up to her mouth to blow her breath across them. Instead, she dropped to one knee beside him and plucked the comm deftly from his red hands. “Armpits,” she ordered, not looking at him.

“Got the skeleton key loaded,” he told her, unzipping his parka clumsily and jamming his hands under his arms to warm them. “Just need to activate it.”

She nodded, tugging off her own gloves and pressing them between her thighs to keep them as warm as possible. The screen on this old comm was small and inconvenient, several models out of date and highly unpopular in Core worlds or the Inner Rim. Probably why they were so useful to the rebellion, Jyn thought in the small part of her mind that disassociated from the rest while she tapped out code lines as fast as she could. No major retailers made or sold them, so only people who were willing to take the time to figure them out knew how they operated. Or how they could be used to exploit the newer, more user-friendly crud.

The rest of her mind was occupied with the space between Cassian’s shoulder and her own. Now that there was light, he didn’t seem willing to get closer than a few handspans. Even before Scarif, before everything, there had been…less distance between them.

Maybe she really had overstepped.

Well, she could fix it now. It was fine.

Her fingers were flushing red, and the sensation of dozens of sharp teeth gnawing at her skin was rapidly growing unbearable. Jyn forced herself not to wince, and tapped in the final few keys to start the skeleton key. The lights on the comm flashed red and then blue, and Jyn balanced it on her knee and reached for her gloves. “This is against regs,” she said softly, not sure why she suddenly felt the need to talk. No, the need to talk to _Cassian._ The need to make him talk to her. (This was stupid. She'd just overreached for more than she could have, it wasn't like that had never happened to her before. She'd be fine. He was alive, he had come back for her, and that was all that mattered.)

“Yes.” Cassian cupped his (still chilly, but relatively warmer) hands around hers, and pulled them up to his mouth. Jyn stared at him, but he didn’t look up, seemingly wholly concentrated on pressing her fingers to his mouth and breathing heavily, rubbing what little warmth he could into their fingers. “But it needs to be done,” he said against her palm, and Jyn thought for a moment that his mouth twitched up in a small smile.

It did not feel particularly professional.

“Are we ready?” Sergeant Cari asked from behind Jyn, and Cassian dropped her hands and grabbed the comm from her knee, standing up and stepping behind her towards the sergeant.

“Get your wounded prepped for transport,” Cassian ordered, and the sound of his voice jolted Jyn out of her momentary stupor. She shot to her feet and yanked her gloves back on, moving back to Rahn’s side. The boy seemed even worse, or perhaps it was simply that she had forgotten for a moment how bad he looked.

“Rahn,” she said loudly. When there was no response, she leaned closer and said “How long since I last woke you up?”

“...eight...eight...m...,” the boy mumbled twitching a little into life at her voice. “Nine min’ts. Beads?” he asked as she reached to help the lumpy one, Heric, swiftly pull him onto a makeshift stretcher.

“Here, here, on your neck, Meiu, stop fussing,” Heric said in an exasperated tone, but his hand was gentle as he moved Rahn’s nerveless fingers back up to his necklace. Jyn eyed the lump, but let it go. It had been a long…several months.

The song ended.

Across Rahn’s body, the lump looked up. So did several other rebels. Near the wall, Cassian stood perfectly still, the comm held up towards the top of the wall. A breathless hush filled the trench, and Jyn strained her ears for the sounds of bomber engines.

Then a rough, unsteady voice from somewhere outside broke into a song about…a fellow who sang lots of songs, apparently. Several of the rebels around her relaxed slightly as they opened their mouths to join in. Sergeant Cari’s white horns flashed in the lantern’s light as she raised it a little closer to the aluminum ceiling, letting the light reflect brighter in the trench.

“Mmf,” Rahn grunted on his stretcher. “’S a stupid one.”

They were all pretty stupid, in Jyn’s opinion, but if it kept the night quiet, she would listen to them all. “You should join in,” she told the boy, checking that his jacket was zipped all the way to his chin. Then went to stand by Cassian again. There was nothing more she could do for the wounded now, except buy them time to make it back to HQ.

“Ready?” Cassian asked softly as she came close (but not too close, hovering just within arm’s reach). He looked from the comm to her, a frown passing over his face, but then he wiped it away and simply watched her, waiting.

She nodded.

Cassian pressed the comm button and said, “All units on this frequency, this is…Firebird. Request black-alpha, thirty-two and a second twist. Repeat, this is Firebird. Request black-alpha, thirty-two and a second twist.”

That wasn’t a code Jyn recognized, although it was vaguely similar to some older codes she had stolen from the Imps when she ran with the Partisans. Cassian was probably using an older code so the Imps would care less when they realized it had been compromised. She hoped. Or maybe it was too old, and the ‘troopers out in the snow wouldn’t recognize –

“Firebird, this is HG-7743,” a new, haughty voice snapped back almost immediately. “Authenticate yellow red Ryloth.”

Cassian paused, glanced again at Jyn, then set his jaw. “Unable. Request black-alpha, thirty-two and a second twist.”

A pause, where Jyn could practically _see_ the incredulous outrage on the Imp’s face as he realized that he was not talking to another stormtrooper. “You want a _reprieve?_ ” the ‘trooper snarled incredulously.

There was a faint echo on the comm under his words, a sign that more than one transmitter was hooked into the conversation. Cassian tilted the screen towards Jyn, and she saw multiple transmission signals flashing across the bottom. There was no way to know which were Imperial and which were Rebel, but that many links meant that every unit in the vicinity was probably patched in. Whatever Cassian said next, they would all hear, and from the look on his face, he knew it. The singing had abruptly stopped, there was nothing but the crackle of static and the shadow in Cassian’s face as he raised the comm slowly.

Jyn found herself pressing against his shoulder, and she nearly stepped back again, _professionals_ ringing in her ears, but Cassian leaned against her suddenly and Jyn froze in place. Fuck it, if this was where he needed her, this was where she would be. She could figure out the rest later.

Cassian clicked on the comm. “This war will not be won tonight,” he said softly, though Jyn could swear she heard his voice echoing from every direction, his words winding through a dozen different trenches and a thousand different soldiers. “We will lay down our rifles and gather our dead, and we offer you that same chance.” Against her shoulder, Cassian was painfully still. “We will keep the light on tonight,” he said, clear and almost gentle. “Will you?”

Silence.

Across the trench, Rahn – or perhaps one of the other wounded, it was hard to tell – drew in a long, rattling breath. Lumpy Heric shifted his weight, his broad hands clasped in front of his round belly. Cari leaned harder against the wall, her head bowed and her blaster clutched to her chest. Outside, Jyn could just see the shaved heads of the closest ‘troopers, all looking in one direction at something in their own trench.

The comm crackled again. “Acknowledged,” the Imperial voice said, almost as quietly as Cassian. For a moment the comm continued to hum as if the speaker was holding down the mike, preparing to say more, then abruptly it went silent again.

Jyn stepped up to the wall and grabbed the ledge.

Cassian’s hand closed on her shoulder, and she glanced back to see that his face was pale. “Wait,” he started, but Jyn shook her head.

“Before they change their mind,” she said, and hauled herself out of the gap and onto the snowy streets above.

The ‘troopers in the nearby trench turned as one to stare.

Every muscle in Jyn’s body tensed, her guts churned, and Saw bellowed in the back of her head that she was a reckless fool and a dead woman walking.

The nearest body was seven paces away.

She took a step.

The snow crunched under her foot, and the sound seemed to echo in the silence.

She stepped again.

Someone to the left started to sing.

Another step.

Another voice joined the song, from a different direction. A rebel climbed out of the trench behind her and took significantly larger steps to catch up. Cassian.

Step.

More voices singing. The ‘troopers across the rubble watched her, silent and still, their faces almost as blank as their helmets.

Step.

Movement from the Imperials’ trench. One of the ‘troopers had grabbed the edge of his own wall.

Step.

The ‘trooper hauled himself out of his trench, helmetless but otherwise fully clad in that hateful white armor. The singing faltered, and he froze.

Step. The body at her feet was a Human male, as far as she could tell, and frozen stiff on his back in the snow. Jyn looked at the ‘trooper, a Human that the Imperial war machine had made almost as smooth and featureless as his armor. He stared back, and Jyn wondered irrelevantly what she looked like to him.

Behind her, Cassian reached the spot just behind her shoulder, and then he stopped too. The singing was still wafting on the cold air around them, but it was weak and wavering, hanging by the thinnest thread and ready to snap.

Jyn knelt by the body, dropping her gaze from the ‘trooper to the task at hand. The song grew louder, more voices joining in, the tune steadying. Jyn heard the ‘trooper’s boots crunching through the snow, not directly towards her, but close enough to make all the hair on her neck stand up.

Cassian shuffled around to the dead rebel’s feet and grabbed his ankles as Jyn hooked her hands under his arms. Together, they lifted, and then walked slowly back towards their trench. The dead man was stiff enough that it felt more like carrying a piece of debris than the remains of a person. Jyn kept her eyes either on the path or on Cassian’s face, and did not think about it.

Two more rebels emerged as they came close, moving cautiously past Jyn and out into the snow. One of them was particularly lumpy, covered in cable-knit scarves and poorly-made sweaters under his old coat. “Could have been a dentist,” the lump muttered as he passed Jyn. He huffed into his scarves and stomped through the thick snow drifts towards a half-buried body. His grumbles drifted back to her with the breeze. “We are all of us mad.”

Jyn had her back to the ‘troopers now, but Cassian’s eyes flicked over her shoulder for a long moment, and she could tell he was counting. More of them must be coming out. Two streets to the right, Jyn could just pick out a handful of raggedly-dressed people crawling out of another sunken street and picking their way through the rubble. Still more white armor was just visible climbing out of yet another trench a few blocks away, the ‘troopers winking in and out of sight as they moved through the shattered remains of some kind of shop, their unmasked eyes on the ground as they searched.

Jyn and Cassian maneuvered the frozen corpse through the gap and into the trench, where Cari gathered it into her arms and carried it a few steps down the trench. “Figured I should stay down here,” she said wryly to Jyn. “Best to keep the “non-humans” out of sight,” she wrinkled her nose, but then she carried the body away without another word.

“She’s probably right,” Cassian said quietly, moving to stand close to Jyn’s side again. “Stormtrooper training is thorough,” he frowned out at the snowy upper streets, “and this is fragile enough.”

Jyn shrugged, ignoring how her shoulder brushed his chest. “Another?” she jerked her head towards the gap. She turned to pull herself back up, sliding a little to the side to let Heric and his partner lower another body, the corpse’s obviously damaged head wrapped in one of Heric’s knit scarves to hide it from view. Cassian hung back just long enough to help them lower the body to the trench ground, then he followed close at her heels, his eyes wary and his shoulders tense.

All told, they brought back twenty-four dead rebels to their own trench before Cari ordered her people to stop. Outside, the ‘troopers were slowly vanishing from the upper streets, and the other rebels also began to shuffle back out of sight.

“We’ll need to relocate,” Cassian told the sergeant as he slid back into the trench after Jyn, setting his hand on her shoulder to steady himself when his boots caught slightly. Jyn automatically leaned back against him to help his balance, and then hurriedly stepped away as soon as he was stable.

The sergeant nodded crisply and turned to her living soldiers. “Volunteers to carry the injured back,” she called, and a handful of weary rebels shuffled forward. Cari sorted them quickly and assigned two bearers each to the five stretchers – wait, that was wrong.

“Six,” Jyn blurted without thinking, and the sergeant paused.

“Five,” she said gravely, and behind her, Jyn saw one of the rebels settling another lumpy scarf over the face of the body on the far end of the line. _I figure they would have wanted me to stand up,_ the boy said fiercely, proud and determined despite being alone in the world with nothing but a necklace to clutch in the dark.

Her vision was suddenly full of dark skin and ivory horns, as Sergeant Cari stepped close and met her eyes. Then, in a loud voice, she called, “Mieu! How long since we last woke you up?”

Quietly, a garbled voice from under a mound of knit scarves and rough coats replied, “Twenty one min’ts, serg’nt.”

Jyn’s throat felt tight and her head too light. She groped for her kyber, but it was buried under all the layers of her clothes and her hands were too numb from the cold air and the cold bodies she had been hauling. She swallowed hard and willed herself to calm the hells down, _for fuck’s sake, woman, this isn’t your first battle_ , _just get a grip, the boy’s not even dead, get your head in the game, you can handle_ -

“It’s alright,” Cassian said, his hand brushing against her cold, wet face. Wet? _Shit._ “Shh, it’s alright.” He had pulled off his gloves again but his fingers were still mostly warm, and he had moved in front of her, partially shielding her from the other rebels but also standing far too close for teammates, for _professionals_. The tightness in her throat grew worse, and Jyn felt her blood begin to rush with familiar anger. What was he doing? Wasn’t the situation bad enough with her eyes watering and her nose probably dripping and _fuck_ , her chest starting to heave? Wasn’t this war bad enough without adding in the mess of personal feelings and relationships and…wasn’t that what he’d been trying to tell her, only a day or so ago? That it just wasn’t worth it, that there were more important things than personal concerns, that the war left no time for anything outside of comrades in arms, someone to bring back your body. That they needed to be professionals. And yet, here he was, sliding his knuckles gently under her eye and blocking her from view, looking at her like she mattered to him, like her grief was his grief. And _damn_ him, even this small contact in this awful moment still made her skin feel warm and her pulse speed up. Even the barest touch made her _want_ so much more.

It was just…too much.

“ _Don’t._ ” She jerked away from his hand.  

“I’m sorry,” Cassian immediately held his palms up to her and stepped back, the lantern light throwing odd shadows across his face. “I’m sorry. I won’t touch you,” he added, his voice oddly strained, “if you don’t want me to.”

She spun on him, incredulous and furious and just so damn – _what?_ “Tell me something, _Strax_ ,” she threw the fake name between them like a gauntlet and shoved right up into his face, giving him her hard stare, “What, exactly, is your definition of _professional?_ ”

His eyes widened, his eyebrows rose. “What?”

He looked so surprised, like he had _no idea_ what she was talking about, that a bright flame of rage flared up in Jyn’s chest. She wanted to hit him, just launch herself across the space between them and knock him to the cold ground, see how _that_ surprised him. She wanted to turn on her heel and bolt through the tunnels, although she’d probably get about twenty steps before the light failed and she ran her blind ass into a kriffing wall. _Ebajam varbeca troac,_ she needed to do something. Anything.

She opened her mouth to tell him to back off and leave her alone until he figured out his own shit, to demand to know what game he thought he was playing with her, hells, just to call him some of the nastier names that were ricocheting around in her damn head.  “I don’t know what you want from me,” she said instead, and her voice sounded small and scared in her own ears.

 _Fuck you and your fear_ , she railed at herself. _May eternal weeping plague sores grow on you and your pitiful tongue_.  She curled her lips back into a snarl and tried to recover some dignity, and if he laughed at her or worse, pitied her, she really would knock him on his fucking arse.

Cassian’s eyes narrowed, and then he stepped towards her – no, it was more like a lunge, a hard, sudden movement that forced her to dance back to avoid being run over. He surged forward another step and then another, too fast for her to do more than back away instinctively. She felt the chill of the stone wall just a few centimeters from her back, and her rage burned higher, her fists clenched and her blood roaring in her ears. _What the many hells was he –_

“Jyn,” Cassian said in a low voice, and his use of her real name – _again_ , that was twice on one mission, and Cassian _never_ broke identity protocol – snapped her out of her blind fury. They were in the shadows, she realized abruptly, several steps back from the nearest rebel and almost entirely out of the light. The singing was still clearly audible, but it was muted over here. This was as private as they could possibly be in a street full of people. “I am sorry.”

“For what?” she growled, and then, to her horror, she sniffed. Her face was still fucking wet, and her vision blurred at the edges.

“For the past few days,” he said simply. “For what I said in the shuttle. For sleeping at the table.” He sighed, bowed his head, all the aggression gone from his body language now. If she took a swing at him now, he would go down like a sack of pta fruit. “For leaving.”

“I don’t know what you want from me,” she said again.

He gave a short, mirthless laugh. “Everything you were already giving me, before I acted like a,” he paused, his face twisting into a bitter smile, “shitheel,” he finished, using one of her favorite insults.

Jyn swallowed, but she still didn’t understand. Why all the bantha shit, then? Why the distance, the silence, the _professionalism?_

Behind him, Jyn could see the first of the stretcher-bearers disappearing around a distant corner, following the faint beeping of the homing beacon back to Kay and the rebel HQ. Over his other shoulder, Sergeant Cari gently set the dead rebel that wasn’t Rahn at the end of the long row of other dead rebels. The Iktotchi held her black hands over the body’s still chest for a moment, then she reached down and plucked a colorful bracelet from the arm, and tucked it into her belt pouch. She walked without further ceremony to the next body, and took a necklace. On down the line she went, gathering the beads, leaving the bodies.

The rebels caravanning the wounded were still shuffling down the trenches, vanishing into the darkness. At the end, a weary looking woman and Heric the lump were just hoisting the thin body of Mieu Rahn, a boy young enough to be in school and old enough to die in war. Would he make it to the medics? Would it matter if he did? The tight feeling in her throat was almost choking her, her eyes burned and blurred and a part of her wanted the singing to stop and the lights to go out just so she could hide in the dark for a few more minutes.

But that was a selfish, emotional thing to wish for, and she was a professional.

 _We don’t all have the luxury of deciding when and where we want to care about something_ , Cassian had growled at her, and suddenly, Jyn felt the wild urge to laugh. Because she _didn’t_ decide to care, did she? She just…did it. She cared. About the war, about the people trapped inside it, about Bodhi and Kay and Rahn and, yes, and Cassian. Always Cassian.

If he needed her to be professional, she could do that. If he wanted to change the rules, well, she could roll with it until they had time to work out the fine details. When they were off this planet, she could ask him for some kind of list, or guidelines, or something. In the meantime, she could get a damn grip on herself and work through it.

Jyn took a deep breath.

Cassian was still waiting silently when she finally turned to look at him.

“Don’t cut me out again,” she said slowly, a warning and a plea.

He nodded.

Jyn closed her eyes for a moment, breathed again. Then she opened them, tilted her chin up, and asked, “What now?”

Cassian held his hand between them. Jyn glanced over his shoulder again; Cari was still moving down the line, focused on her grim task. The various other rebels, however, could easily see them, shadows or no shadows.

Jyn lifted her hand and skimmed her palm lightly against his.

“Alright,” she said, and then grimaced with frustration when she sniffled again, because her stupid fucking eyes were still watering. She dropped her arm and tried to say, as briskly as possible, “I’m ready to go when you are.”

Cassian kissed her.

In full view of the strangers all huddled around the lantern, he simply closed the distance between them, cupped his hands around her face, and leaned down. It was a soft kiss, and a brief one, but he did it right in front of rebels and corpses and maybe even Imperials, who the hells knew who could see them out here? But when Cassian pulled back, he didn’t pull away, he rested his forehead against hers and swiped his thumbs across her damp cheekbones slowly. As if it didn’t matter that they were not alone. As if he didn’t care about consequences or weaknesses or professionalism at all.

“They can see,” she mumbled, stiff with shock, her hands half raised but frozen in the air next to his sides.

“Needs to be done,” he replied, his breath slipping down warm and soft against her cold face, his tone completely unconcerned.

 _(You’re alive,_ he’d whispered in the dark of the collapsed trench, his voice rough with what she’d thought was just relief but may, in retrospect, have also been joy.)

Jyn gripped his jacket tightly in both hands, closing her eyes and letting herself just… _not care_ about the nearby rebels, or the ‘troopers just a grenade’s throw away, or even the whole of the thrice-damned war and the relentless demands it made on them all. Cassian’s hands slid into her hair and he sighed softly, his breath warm against her face. Behind him, people she didn’t know shuffled and sneezed and sang their silly songs, but he didn’t flinch away, so Jyn squeezed her eyes tight and focused on his fingers in her hair and his chest moving against her palms.

The war was not over, the dead were still stretched in a long, silent line, and tomorrow – or in an hour, or perhaps next week – the lanterns would be snuffed out, the songs would end, and the bombing would begin again. But right now, just for a moment, the voices of Imperial and rebel alike blended into an indistinguishable whole as they sang of snow and lights and loved ones far away, the soft yellow light of a dozen different lanterns pushed back against the moonless night, and the snow drifted on the breeze.

Jyn leaned into Cassian’s warmth and let herself believe, just for a moment, that they were going to be alright.

 

\--

 

The worst part of the war, in Bodhi’s opinion, the very _worst_ part, bar none, was the _waiting_.

The actual combat was terrifying, yes. The eroding despair of watching your people slowly ground down by battle after battle, ships and supplies and people vanishing into darkness until you were all scrambling for something to replace them, even a hodge-podge group of citizens on a frozen ice ball planet – _that_ was awful. The death and the destruction was horrible, it was, of course it was. But when you found out someone was dead, well, then you could grieve. You yelled or cried or laughed and you told the people who needed to know. You did right by the dead with whatever funeral they wanted, and then you did right by the living and tried to heal.

And if you found out that you were all alive, well, then you got on with that, too.

But the time in between, the time when you didn’t know if your people were alive or dead, the interminable uncertainty of waiting – there was nothing to be done, no words to say, no thoughts to think aside from _are they? Did they? Will they?_

And, in the back of your head, in the quietest, most insidious little whisper, _what about me?_

“This concludes our fourth complete circuit of the facilities,” Kay said above his head. Farther up, a light stuttered and went out, then dimly flickered back to gloomy life. “I calculate the likelihood of significant change in the last ten minutes to be less than five percent.” He turned his glowing optics to Bodhi and asked tonelessly, “Shall we check again?”

Bodhi made a face at him. “I’m not checking for, for changes. I’m just…” he waved a hand randomly in front of him. “Walking,” he finished lamely.

“Typically a form of motion intended to transport a being from one location to another distinct and different location.” Kay turned his metal head to look pointedly at the front door of the gymnasium/headquarters, which they were passing for, yes, the fourth time in roughly an hour.

“It’s also an excellent form of exercise,” Bodhi shot back grouchily, darting to the side to allow a harassed looking rebel shuffle past him, her arms full of threadbare blankets and what looked like stained bandages. He glanced at the doors, but they stayed firmly closed against the snow.

“The only exercise here,” Kay said, clumping along next to Bodhi as they started to circle along the walls again, “is this exercise in futility.”

“Ha ha,” Bodhi grumbled, twisting his fingers into the material of his sleeves until the cloth started to cut off his blood flow. He made himself let go and shake his fingers out, reminding himself not to destroy his clothes. “Then what do you, you know, _suggest?_ ”

Another rebel came striding towards them, a burly Human with a heavy coat and a fierce scowl on his face. Bodhi shuffled to the side again, but Kay continued to walk in a straight line, unperturbed. The big man eyed Kay as he approached, but made no attempt to alter his course. A moment later, he bounced right off of Kay’s chest and stumbled back a few steps, looking startled and offended. Clearly, he had expected the droid to step out of his way.

“Hey, droid,” he said irritably.

“I accept your apology,” Kay responded immediately, and clanked onward, leaving the man staring after him. Bodhi hurried to keep up.

“Ca- Strax probably wouldn’t approve of you picking fights,” he muttered, struggling to sound reproving while his mouth twitched into a smirk.

“I did no such thing,” Kay replied blandly.

“People aren’t going to think very well of us if we knock them over,” Bodhi said, but absently, his mind already drifting back outside to the cold, dark world that he knew was out there. There were only two windows in the gymnasium, and both had heavy blackout curtains carefully taped around the edges to prevent any light from escaping. Not that it mattered. There was nothing to see out there.

“It is a waste of energy to care what people think,” Kay announced as they reached the back wall of the gymnasium and had to make a slightly wonky curve around the bedsheets that marked both Command and Medical. The surprising warmth of the wall soaked into Bodhi’s side, and the urge to step closer to it warred with his vague sense of repulsion for what was actually on the other side of that wall. He had discovered where the beads came from about an hour after Cassian had bolted out of here to find Jyn, and it had done nothing for his nerves.

“Why is that?” he asked, turning sideways to slide between two metal cots piled high with ammunition packs.

“Because statistically,” Kay replied, “they don’t.”

Bodhi blinked, and then laughed a little despite himself. “Thanks, Kay,” he said quietly.

The droid whirred slightly. Bodhi half expected an acerbic comment about how he wasn’t trying to be funny or distracting. To his mild surprise, Kay simply looked down at him for a moment, his optics refocusing on Bodhi’s face in an almost considering way, and then he slouched onward.

“Would you like to know the probability that they will both return unharmed?”

Bodhi hurried to catch up, and opened his mouth to say _no, thank you_ , but something in the way Kay had asked niggled at him. In his memories, his mother sang softly, _we are all bright lights,_ _we are all a light to the darkness_ , so after a thoughtful pause, he said, “Sure. If you want to, um, talk about it.”

“Twenty-seven percent,” Kay said immediately. They both had to stop to allow two rebels, one limping and leaning on the other, to shuffle past them, the healthy one waving a hand in gratitude. The heavy blackout curtain over the smaller of the windows rippled slightly as Bodhi’s shoulder brushed against it, and he had the sudden impulsive urge to rip it down and stare out into the dark. Stupid, really. Like Jyn and Cassian would just be standing on the other side, waiting for him to let out the light.

“Okay,” Bodhi said as they started again, shaking his head and trying to force all the jittery fragments of his brain back into their right places. It was a little like doing a jigsaw puzzle in the dark, if the puzzle was really a shattered glass window. “What about the odds that they will come back with only minor injuries?”

“Thirty-nine percent.”

Bodhi glanced back at the limping rebel. “One injured and the other fine?”

“Her injured, forty-seven percent. Him injured,” Kay’s voicebox seemed to take on a slightly bitter tone, although perhaps that was simply Bodhi’s expectation, “Fifty-six percent.”

“Higher? But, um, she’s the more, more reckless one.”

“And he is an idiot,” Kay said flatly.

Bodhi thought he might understand the droid’s concern a little better. “He doesn’t leave people behind.”

“Before this team was formed,” Kay said shortly, “he did. Often.”

They walked in silence for several minutes, and then Bodhi tentatively offered, “Maybe that’s why he won’t now.”

Another few minutes of silence, and then they had reached the front door again. “This concludes our, um, our fifth circuit of the facilities,” Bodhi said a bit lamely. “What are the odds things have changed since we were, you know, here?”

He meant it as a joke, but of course Kay instantly replied with, “Three percent, to a negligible margin of error.”

“Does it bother you?” Bodhi asked as they set off again, curving along the wall and looking up at the beaded Banner hanging overhead. “That he goes back for her?”

For a moment, he didn’t think Kay would respond. Then, at last, he said, “Considering his increase in emotional health and functionality since the formation of their partnership,” he held out a metal hand abruptly and caught a string of beads that had suddenly come loose from a rickety music stand of some kind and started to drop to the ground, “no. The benefits outweigh the risks.” A shy-faced youth rushed over and nervously held out her arms until Kay dropped the beads carelessly into her palms. She murmured what sounded like a muffled _thanks_ and rushed away, cradling the beads against her chest.

Bodhi realized that he was picking at his sleeves again, worrying the already worn cloth thin, and forced himself to stop. “So you’re not worried that she’s endangering him?”

“Everything endangers him,” Kay stepped slightly back to allow Bodhi to proceed him through the narrow gap between the two beds piled with ammunition again, and then resumed his pace beside him. “Organics are remarkably fragile like that.”

“Guess we are,” Bodhi agreed. “But hey, it’s, um, it’s a pretty good life, if you can get it.” He laughed weakly at his own small joke, and then found his fingers plucking at his sleeve again, and had to jam both fists irritably into his pockets. He opened his mouth to say something else, maybe something about the beads which were all over everything in this place, maybe something about how the howling blizzard seemed to have died down outside (and maybe ask if they could slip out the front door and…check). Before he could get a word out, Kay suddenly stopped. It was one thing to watch an organic being come to a halt, usually a gradual process that involved several very small movements before the individual was still, but droids just went from moving sentient to statue in a fraction of a second. It was jarring, every time. Kay in particular made for an intimidating statue, looming over most people and watching with unblinking yellow eyes. That was probably why the nearest rebels suddenly shied away from him, as if he had made some overtly dangerous movement rather than a complete lack of one.

“Kay?” Bodhi turned back to face him, frowning. “Hey! What’s, um, what’s wro-”

Abruptly, Kay came to life again, walking briskly around Bodhi and straight for the door. “Incoming,” he said, and several rebels shot up from their seats or cots, scrambling for rusty blasters and sputtering short-range defensive shields, or whatever those old force-field barriers were called. Bodhi lunged after Kay, shoving apologetically through the suddenly bustling crowd to follow.

“Hey, hey wait!”

“Do you hear that?” A Filordi suddenly rose up on his hind legs, his ears perked and his head cocked towards the door. Bodhi half expected the Humans around him to continue shoving forward heedlessly, but to his surprise, most of them froze, holding their breaths and looking to the Filordi expectantly. Bodhi slowed too, staring. His own shock shamed him a little – _I guess Imperial thinking is harder to shed than it seems_ – but then the Filordi held up one thin claw, and Bodhi found himself holding his breath too.

“Is it ’troopers?” someone whispered.

“Tanks?” guessed another.

“Bombs?” a third quavered.

The Filordi shook his head hard, causing his ears to flap and the beads sewn into his jacket to clink together. Then, in an odd tone, he said, “Singing.”

K2SO was already out the front door, and Bodhi caught a glimpse of the old woman at the entrance propping her massive rifle on her shoulder, beady eyes intent on the outer door before the inner one swung shut and blocked her from view.

“Singing?” Commander Kelrune was suddenly there, the glowering Elatar right behind her. “Outside?”

“Human voices, mostly,” the Filordi confirmed, then dropped back to all four of his lower limbs. His upper two limbs raised his blaster defensively. “But some of them are ours.”

“Some of them,” Kelrune muttered.

Bodhi decided he would be better served going to look than standing here wondering. He threw his scarf around his neck and pushed determinedly towards the door again.

Behind him, he heard the commander suddenly order, “Turn off the lights.”

“Sim - ” Elatar protested not quite softly enough to be discreet.

“All of them,” Kelrune snapped. “And then take down the blackout curtains.”

Bodhi got to the door just as the lights snuffed out, and he smacked his hand a little hard against the plaswood in the sudden blackout, but it swung open enough for him to stumble through. “Please don’t shoot me,” he called to where he thought the old woman was standing, and then doggedly shuffled forward until his fumbling hands found the freezing cold outer door. He had to throw his shoulder against it to force it open, and he realized belatedly that he didn’t have any night vision goggles, so he’d be just as blind out there as he was in here.

A moment later, he forgot all about it.

There were lights everywhere.

Kay was standing a few steps away from the door, his internal servos buzzing, a black silhouette against an unbroken white background. A background that Bodhi shouldn’t be able to see, except for the lone lines of lights that spread like small bright rivers, or perhaps veins pulsing out from some invisible heart, sprawling across the city scape before him. He realized abruptly that the headquarters was actually on top of a large hill, and the majority of Veladine’s capital was down in the valley below him. So he could track the lines of flickering golden lights that spread randomly along what must be the trenches he had heard about. Large swathes of the city were still dark, but there was enough to see that it was, at least once, a city.

And faintly, rising and falling on the fitful breeze, the sound of singing.

 _Dancing in the darkness, we are all of us lost together,_ Mum sang in his head, and Bodhi tapped his fingers against his thigh and looked out at the improbable sight before him, _little lights shining on this dark night._

Kay’s optics, bright against the cloudy night sky, turned towards him. “You are humming.”

“Yeah,” Bodhi answered quietly. “My mum’s favorite Festival song.”

“It is a pleasant sound,” Kay said after a beat. “You may continue.”

Behind them, the door opened again, and Bodhi heard footsteps, several footsteps, flooding out into the snow. Gasps, a few murmurs, and then the rebels stood behind him, looking at their ruined, shining city.

_“Kay? Kay, are you receiving?”_

The voice, muffled by static and rough with uncertainty, came suddenly from Kay’s chassis, and Bodhi jerked and spun to face the droid.

“Signal is loud and clear,” Kay said out loud, and he gave Bodhi a pointed look until the pilot remembered his own earpiece and rushed to yank it from his pocket and cram it into his ear.

A moment later, the static clarified, Kay’s external speaker went silent, and in Bodhi’s ear a much clearer voice said, _“Is the line secured?”_

 _“Hello, Cassian,”_ Kay said on the comms where only the three of them could hear. “ _This line is secured and private to our team.”_

 _“Is Bodhi patched in?_ ”

“Yes! I, um, I hear you. Loud and clear,” Bodhi said quickly, then, “Did you find - ?”

 _“Hey,”_ Jyn’s voice sounded even and calm, not breathless or pained at all. Bodhi closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath, then another.

 _“We are returning to base,”_ Cassian said, sounding equally as composed. Bodhi opened his eyes and looked again at the shining lights, heard the distant sound of music, and felt the knots in his guts starting to dissolve. The worst part, he knew, was always the waiting.

Cassian’s voice crackled a few times, but the connection held steady as he said, _“Multiple friendlies should be inbound just ahead of us, with wounded.”_

“I, uh, think they just got here,” Bodhi said as one of the rebels behind him gave a cry and ran forward. Several shapes were emerging from the nearest sunken-street entrance, staggering under the burden of stretchers and limping companions. The rebels nearest the entrance all came surging to help, and Bodhi almost went too, but he had a few other things he needed to take care of first.

“You both okay?” he demanded, “Really okay, I mean? Not, not 'oh, it’s just a little blood, just a flesh wound, no one needs two kidneys, don’t be, um, don’t be silly.' Right?”

There was a pause, and the knots tightened in his stomach again until Jyn’s voice came back, dry and amused, _“I never say that.”_

“ _You have said all of those things, some of them an average of twice a month for the past six months,_ ” Kay replied instantly, and from his tone Bodhi knew he was preparing to list every one of them.

Apparently, Cassian knew it too, because he came on the comm quickly and said, “ _If the wounded are arriving, we should only be about ten minutes out. Are you two alright?”_

 _“There appears to be a significant break down in safety regulations and operating procedures,”_ Kay informed him gravely. “ _Multiple violations of blackout protocols.”_ He paused, then added, _“People are singing.”_

 _“We hear it,”_ Cassian said quietly.

“The Imperial forces,” Bodhi started, glanced nervously around, lowered his voice. “The Imperials forces too, I, um, I think.”

This time it was Jyn who answered. “ _Yes_ ,” she said simply. “ _Them too._ ”

 _“It will not last,”_ Cassian said in the small silence afterwards. “ _But for now…”_ The comm hissed and then snapped off, and Bodhi huddled in his jacket and scarf and watched the trench entrance for two faces he knew.

“For now,” Bodhi repeated quietly, “it’s good.”

“ _Yeah,”_ Jyn agreed in his ear, and he could almost see the soft smile she wore sometimes when she was calm and safe and standing closer to Cassian than was generally considered polite. _“It’s good.”_

Beside him, Kay was still as a statue again, but his optics focused and refocused as he scanned the rebels staggering back into the headquarters, and he and Bodhi both noted the smiling faces, the hands curled tightly around shoulders and waists and fingers of their returning friends. Bodhi’s friends were alive and returning. He would throw his arms around them both and maybe later tell them about the Bright Song and the lanterns of Jedha, forever dark now but not, perhaps, entirely gone.

The distant singing drifted on the softly-lit night breeze, and the heavy doors of the HQ opened and closed as more people rushed in and out, exclaiming at the lights, carrying their wounded indoors, softly joining in with the chorus. In his memory, Mum held her favorite green lantern up in their small kitchen and danced in a circle as she sang _the light, the light, my beloved one, the light in your eyes is never lost in the darkness,_ and Bodhi tilted his head and listened to the song.

Two lone figures stalked out of the tunnel entrance, walking much closer than was generally considered polite, and Kay’s footsteps were loud as he crunched forward through the snow towards them. Bodhi hurried to catch up, humming under his breath as he went.

Behind them, the city was filled with light.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Initially, Rahn died in this chapter, but then Allatariel reminded me that this is a Holiday story, and so   
> (so long as they had a name)
> 
> The Festian ice carving displays that Cassian describes are modeled after the [Sapporo Snow Festival](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapporo_Snow_Festival), which I was lucky enough to attend once. It is [pretty awesome](https://www.google.com/search?q=sapporo+snow+festival&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj6oJbpz5vYAhUFyWMKHTTCAqEQ_AUICigB&biw=1280&bih=929#imgrc=GmrTfEMlbr3ljM:&spf=1513877141884). I liked the idea of Fest natives [getting really elaborate](http://zzamboni.org/images/2012/01/22/harbin-international-ice-and-snow-festival-20/37005798-media_httpinapcachebo_szdBp.jpg) with their Festival lights, even as they fought against the very Republic that the Festival supposedly celebrated. Not that I think Festians were in support [of the Empire](http://www.cnn.com/travel/gallery/sapporo-snow-star-wars/index.html?gallery=0), but holidays leave deep impacts on a culture, no matter what their origins.
> 
> The song that they first hear can be whatever tune you like to headcanon, but my personal favorite is an adjusted version of [May It Be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8u4VLk0iTI) by Enya, from the Lord of the Rings movies. Just replace the Elvish with Mandalorian (or Star Wars language of your choice). But again, whatever song you like best, imagine a lot of tired, cold soldiers singing it in the utter darkness, then lighting their candles or lanterns in good faith.
> 
> The [Filordi](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Filordus) is an interesting species that I discovered too late in the writing of this to use very effectively, but you can bet I’m going to try and get one in somewhere else. I do love unique, definitely Not A Human in A Funny Hat aliens. 
> 
> For those without hover text: "Ebajam varbeca troac" = headcanon mandolarian curse that more or less means "[My] Stupid disobedient genitals" (it's sort of a reference to my other story "Fighting Words." 
> 
> I did not have them playing a fun game together in no-man’s land both because that really only happened in one or two places, most of the time the truce was much more cautious than that, and honestly, stormtroopers are not random teenagers recruited to the glorious cause…well, they were once, but they go through rigorous mental training/brainwashing before they are sent out in that shiny armor to crush the galaxy beneath their standard issue boots. So the truce in this case would be less about young people who didn’t really want to fight in the first place and more about weary soldiers who know that the war will go on tomorrow, but just once, _just once_ , they all want to…stop. Just for a moment.


End file.
